Patricia Lott

Associate Professor of American Studies, African American and Africana Studies and English

Patricia Ann Lott is an Associate Professor of American Studies, African American and Africana Studies, and English at Ursinus. Lott earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in African American Studies, her M.A. in African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. in English from Dillard University in New Orleans. She is a 2019-20 recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She also held the inaugural Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and a UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Lott’s current manuscript, “Memory’s Ruins: The U.S. North’s Forgotten Confederacies with Racial Slavery,” uses the shock evoked by contemporary excavations of bondage’s past lives in the U.S. North to construct a critical genealogy of how that history escaped public collective memory. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to trace conflicting portrayals of the North’s confederacies with slavocracy and abolitionism in the region’s nineteenth-century commercial, legal, print, visual, and performance cultures. The work also deliberates on how the disavowal of racial slavery in the North has circumscribed the range and kinds of politics that people mobilize to confront racism, regionalism, and reparation in the afterbirth of emancipation into the contemporary.

Department

African American and Africana Studies Program, American Studies, and English

Degrees

B.A. in English (Dillard University)

M.A. in African American Studies (U.C. Berkeley)

Ph.D. in African American Studies (Northwestern University)

Teaching

  • Afrofuturism
  • Black Atlas
  • Death and the Black Subject
  • Issues in AAAS
  • Race and the University

Research Interests

African American and African Diaspora Literature; Racial Slavery and Its Afterlife; Emancipation; Public Collective Memory; Performance and Visual Culture; Black Geography; American Regionalism; and Cultural History

Related News

Patricia Lott
Getting to Know: Dr. Patricia Lott
Dr. Patricia Lott is one of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s 32 Career Enhancement Fellows for 2019-20. She talks to Ursinus Magazine about digital history and more.
Photo showing Vice President for Inclusion with the 2024 Recipients of the Ursinus Beloved Community Awards.
Beloved Community Awards Presented

The 2024 Beloved Community Awards were presented on March 26 to college recipients: Maddie Benfield ’25, Cayden Johnson ’25, Marqus Hunter, Marion McKinney, Johannes Karreth, and Patricia Lott. In addition, the awards ceremony recognized community partners who have distinguished themselves by their commitment to building the Beloved Community.

Patricia Lott is one of 32 new Career Enhancement Fellows honored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Ursinus Scholar Earns Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship

Patricia Lott, an Assistant Professor of African American and Africana Studies, American Studies, and English, is one of 32 new Career Enhancement Fellows and will receive funding to pursue professional development opportunities and continue her research.