PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Florida
Kimberly Williams is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Florida where her work encompasses Blackness, rhetoric, and sound studies across multimedia and literature. She previously graduated from Virginia Tech (BS) and Cornell University (M.F.A.) and claims Virginia as her home. She held previous fellowships with the National Humanities Council, Callaloo Oxford Residency, the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, Crisner Museum Fellowship, and the Association for African American Museum Fellowship. You can find her works in Sounding Out! Journal of the Society for American Music, Peitho, Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, and more recently Global Black Feminisms: Cross Border Collaboration through an Ethics of Care published by Routledge. She has been awarded the 2022 Ruth McQuown Justice Scholarship, 2019 Virginia Tech Black Excellence Black Student Ally Award and the 2018 Virginia Tech’s Ed McPherson Lifetime Achievement Award for Social Activism & Change.
My research concerns Blackness, sound studies, and rhetoric or more specifically–I study how Black people create sonic testimonies through embodiment, literature, and multimedia studies. In my dissertation, I research how Black communities developed sonic practices across multiple disciplines during the COVID-19 quarantine and simultaneous Black Lives Matter Movement efforts. These examples include the Verzuz battles, Zong digital memorial, and sonic responses to “wokeness.”