Tara M. Holman
Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing
Tara M. Holman is a scholar of African American literature and visual culture. Her research turns to the fields of Black feminisms, Black poetics, and performance studies to raise questions about Black relationality, gender, and experimentalism. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Duets, a poetics of black relating, which explores form as an ideological trope of and expressive potential for Black kinship in 20th-and 21st-century Black poetry and performance art.
In addition to her scholarship, Holman is deeply committed to preserving the legacy of Black women writers and celebrating the vibrancy of our contemporary Black arts. She has worked with museums and archives on curatorial efforts and public education initiatives, and her feature writing has appeared in ASAP/Review and Mosaic Magazine.
Recent Courses Taught
Black Women’s Literary Renaissance
Fiction and Autobiography
Intro to African American Lit and Theory
Passing Down
Reading Blackness
Research Interests
African American literature, Black and women of color feminisms, performance studies, poetry and poetics, queer theory, visual culture studies
Selected Publications
- Holman, Tara. “Multiply Exposed: Black Ungendered Maternity in Lorna Simpson’s 1957-2009 Interior.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2026.2719967. 2026.
- “Presence to Possibility: Interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” Mosaic, Special Issue: Black/Queer/Lit, Guest Edited by Mecca Jamillah Sullivan. Summer 2023.
Professional Affiliations
American Studies Association (ASA)
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
College Language Association (CLA)
Modern Language Association (MLA)
National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
Appointed to the Faculty
2025Educational Background
Ph.D., Brown University
B.A., Bryn Mawr College
