Quantá Holden, Digital Communications Specialist
Matthew Omelsky, 2018 Duke English Ph.D. graduate, recently sat down and reflected on his time at Duke and the Duke experience. Matthew completed his undergraduate studies in Africana Studies and Politics at New York University. His interest in African diasporic cultures took root during his jazz guitar studies in high school in Cleveland, Ohio and then at the California Institute of the Arts, where he began a longstanding interest in the autobiographies and biographies of legendary jazz musicians. He also cites his year studying Ghanaian dance and drumming at CalArts as central to his intellectual formation. Matthew then pursued his master’s in Africana at Cornell University.
Matthew noted that the work of several Duke English Department faculty members contributed to his intellectual development during his Ph.D. years at Duke, including Professors Tsitsi Jaji and Ranjana Khanna, amongst others.
“I would say that for the most part, I’m finishing the program having accomplished what I came in wanting to accomplish. That’s not to say that I didn’t encounter hurdles along the way, or that I followed a predetermined intellectual path. I arrived wanting to consume knowledge—to expand the base knowledge that I came in with and develop certain breadth of knowledge in my own fields of African and African diaspora studies. But I also came in wanting to become a producerof knowledge, to begin to carve out my own voice in those fields, which is really what I’ve tried to do in my dissertation and in the different publications I was able to place during my time here.”
I’m fortunate to have a couple different opportunities to pursue after graduating in May. The first is a one-year research postdoctoral fellowship with the Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Penn State’s Department of African American Studies. The seminar’s theme, “Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance,” is closely related to my dissertation, so it’s really an ideal opportunity to begin to rework the dissertation as a book project in a dynamic black studies environment, alongside an array of artists and scholars from disparate fields thinking through similar questions. And after this year at Penn State, I’ll begin a tenure-track appointment as an assistant professor of English at the University of Rochester, where I’ll join a department of fantastic scholars and teachers. It’ll be great to settle in there, continuing on with my research while teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in African, Caribbean, and global anglophone literature.