Cheryl Sterling

Professional Bio

CHERYL STERLING, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English and African Studies. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of numerous grants including the Organization of American States fellowship. Her administrative roles include: Director of  African Studies (Penn State 2018-2021) and Black Studies at The City College of New York (CUNY 2013-2018).  Her teaching and research interests overlap the areas of representation, race, and aesthetics in African and African Diaspora Literature, Post-Colonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, Transnational Africana Feminist Theory, Expressive Social and Cultural Movements in the Diaspora, with a focus on Brazil. She has published numerous critical essays in noted journals and in texts such as Migrations and Creative Expressions of Africa and the African Diaspora, Narrating War and Peace in Africa and Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music.  She is the editor of a special issue of WAGADU: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies on African and Diasporic Women's Literature (Winter 2017). Her award-winning book, African Roots, Brazilian Rites: Cultural and National Identity (Palgrave MacMillan 2012), investigates African roots matrix ideologies in the literary and performance traditions of Afro-Brazilians. Her edited volumes include: Transnational Trills in the Africana World, which explores the overlap of politics and creative production (Cambridge SP 2019) and Transnational Africana Women's Fictions (Routledge 2022c, paperback 2025), critically examining the works of African/Diasporan women writers. Prof. Sterling is currently working on a book that creates Aesthetic theory based on Yoruba Orisha paradigms to read African and African Diasporic texts and visual culture.