Pheolyn Allen

Professional Bio

Pheolyn Allen is a dual-titled PhD candidate in English and African American and Diaspora Studies at Penn State. They hold a BA in Media Arts from the University of North Texas, where they served as an instructor for the UNT Youth Media Lab, educating marginalized communities and foster youth in media pedagogy and filmmaking techniques. From 2021-2024 they worked with Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research, serving as a creative producer and director for their various media and broadcasting projects, such as their annual Douglass Day Transcribe-A-Thon. In summer 2023, Pheolyn worked as a Junior Fellow with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the Library of Congress. During their tenure, they curated the public-facing, digital exhibit The Odyssey of Black Studies in Public Broadcasting which examines the rich history of the Black Studies movement, from its inception with the student strikes at San Francisco State University in 1968, to Black Studies celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2019.

Pheolyn's writing and scholarship primarily centers African American and African Diasporic literature, Black speculative fiction, Black Feminism/Womanism, and Queer of Color Critique. Their dissertation, "Dreaming In Shadow: The Black Fantastic in the Age of Black Lives Matter" examines how contemporary Black writers wield speculative genres to rupture historical structures of antiblack violence, offering us new formations of Black survival and resistance through the purview of the uncanny and supernatural.