Kalena Holeman

Kalena Holeman is a PhD student in the Departments of English and Black Studies at Yale University, as well as a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow. Her research sits at the intersection of Black feminist theory and classical reception to better understand antiquity’s influence on modern conceptions of race, literature, and culture. Her work explores Black women’s negotiations of voice and movement in relation to and against the Western literary canon. At Cambridge, her master’s dissertation opened a dialogue between M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Homer’s Odyssey and read articulations of voice and the self through the medium of water. While at Yale, she hopes to deepen her knowledge of Black women’s counter-canonical remappings, drawing on both classical reception and other critical theoretical methods. Previously, she completed an M.Phil. in Classics at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a B.A. in English Literature at the University of Houston.