“Innovative work by [an] emerging scholar…”

~Editors of Modernism/Modernity Print +

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses on Black Diasporic literature and culture, with special interests in poetry and poetics, the digital humanities, public humanities, new media, and technology.

Dr. Adwetewa-Badu is working on a book that examines networks of post-1960s Black Diasporic poets. She is also working on a project about the aesthetic and social possibilities created by Africans through their use of emergent technologies and new media.

Ama Bemma’s writing has been published in or is forthcoming from Comparative Literature Studies, Amerikastudien, Modernism/Modernity Print+, The Black Scholar, the Wallace Stevens Journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Reviews in DH, and a book chapter for an edited collection published by Cambridge University Press, among other places.

Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the African Poetry Book Fund (a re-grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), and Cornell University’s Olin Library. She is currently an executive council member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where she works to advocate for the literary profession and the study of languages and literature.

She has extensive experience as a researcher and public speaker. Her strengths are in communicating complex ideas to diverse groups, including both specialist and non-specialist audiences. She also works to create partnerships between organizations, non-profits, and companies and the resources and knowledge produced in academia. She has worked with a variety of industries including tech startups and non-profits.

Ama Bemma is the founder of the Global Poetics Project, an experimental archive, co-working space, and production studio invested In digital storytelling, mapping, network modeling, and utilizing the digital humanities to study poetry.