Simone Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. She is a former chair of the department of African American and African Studies. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies. She is the author of When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State University Press 2014, Southern Literary Studies Series); co-editor (with Dwan Henderson) of Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press 2020); co-author (with James Phelan, Robyn Warhol, and Lisa Zunshine) Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism: Narrative Analysis for Social Change (forthcoming Rutgers); editor of The Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing (in progress); and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Most recently, she was the Alisa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art where she did research on her forthcoming book (Trillium P, 2024), “Becoming Educated: A Midwest Story,” a meditation on the intersection between law, education, visual art, and music in relationship to the desegregation of Columbus (OH) Public Schools.
Simone received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Maryland-College Park, a Master’s in the Study of Law from OSU Moritz College of Law along with a dual master’s degree in English and African American and African Studies at OSU, and a bachelor’s degree in Classical Civilization and English from Denison University. She lives in Powell with her husband and three sons.
