Alisha Gaines

Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty of African American Studies at Florida State University. She holds a 2009 PhD in English and a certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University. From 2009-2011 she held a Carter G. Woodson postdoctoral fellowship in African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. As a Co-Founder and Co-Humanities Director of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School, in 2024, Alisha won a Community Engaged Research Partnership Grant for her work on plantation tourism in Louisiana's River Parishes.

Alisha's first manuscript, "Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy," was published with UNC Press (Spring 2017). The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. "Black for a Day" constructs a genealogy of mostly White liberals who temporarily "become" Black under the alibi of racial empathy.

An award-winning educator, her interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature, Black Study, narratives of passing, Black Southern Studies, media and performance studies, and Black queer theory.

A student of Black Souths, Alisha is currently writing her second manuscript, "Children of the Plantationocene," on Black American origin stories, what we collectively inherit from the plantation, and slavery reenactments.