Amadi I. Ozier is a professor of Black American Literature and Performance.
She works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY.
Ozier researches race, humor, lynching culture, and black capitalism.
Ozier is also a movement worker and creative strategist. She coordinates crisis response and creates dynamic cultural programming related to police abolition and housing justice. In 2022, Ozier co-founded the Crown Heights Care Collective in Brooklyn, NY.
She resides in Madison, WI, and Brooklyn, NY.
About Amadi I. Ozier
Book Project
Ozier’s book project, Uppity Humor: Irony and the Invention of the Black Middle Class, 1890–1930, argues that African American humor writers drew on the same vocabulary and themes used by race thinkers debating how to improve Black social conditions, using bourgeois notions of propriety and respectability as strategies for racial uplift.
Middle class black writers used a practiced sense of humor to joke about topical issues like lynching, interracial sex, and political disorganization, disrupting blackface minstrel narratives about black people as unintelligent, unhygienic, and lazy. Humor literature was shaped by the same social processes that cultivated New Negro values like exemplarity, collectivity, and intelligence.
Black affluence relied less on wealth than on shared gestures, scripts, and cultural signs signaling relationships to labor, white capital, and racial loyalty. Irony indexed cultural anxieties about Black representation for intra- and interracial audiences amid the development of an emerging Black middle class.
Awards and Publications
Ozier’s research has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research; and Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honors fraternity.
Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Social Text, Early American Literature, Oxford Handbook of African American Humor, and Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies.
Service
Ozier facilitates public workshops on protest preparedness, tenant organization, and campus activism.
Ozier’s work in housing justice, abolitionist popular education, and mutual aid has been generously supported by grants from the New York City Department of Health and the Morgridge Center for Public Service. In 2022, Ozier co-founded the Crown Heights Care Collective in Brooklyn, NY.
Ozier’s community work has appeared in media outlets such as Democracy Now!, the New York Times, Gothamist, and Wisconsin Public Radio.
Art Credit:
Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl in Pink Dress, 1927
Aaron Douglas, Portrait of Marian Anderson, 1940
Lois Mailou Jones, Two Women, 1950
Recent Work
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![Cover of the journal Modernism/modernity.]()
"Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad" - Modernism/modernity
September 2023. James Joyce’s modern, transnational representations of anti-semitism through American iconography around blackness.
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![How to Stage a Rally: A People's Field Guide]()
"How to Stage a Rally: A People's Field Guide" - Crown Heights CARE Collective x Crown Heights Tenant Union
November 2023. Step by step abolitionist guide for organizing creative, large-scale protests and demonstrations without police intervention.
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![Illustration of a black performer]()
Bibliography: "Theater and Performance in the 19th Century" - Oxford Bibliographies
February 2021. This article focuses on primary works and criticism on the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920).
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![Book cover titled 'Cultural Melancholy' depicting a lively street scene with people dancing and playing instruments outside a shop, in vibrant colors.]()
Review Essay: "This Body Still Has Time: Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy"
August 2017. Amadi Ozier on Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015)
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![Book cover titled 'African American Literature in Transition 1750-1800', edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas, depicting an illustration of two people in a forest, one sitting under a tree using a book, and the other chopping wood.]()
Review Essay: "African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800"
Amadi Ozier on African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800 ed. by Rhondda Robinson Thomas (2022)
Humor - Race - Performance - Lynching - Capitalism
Contact
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