About

Dr. Loron Benton is an Andrew W. Mellon-funded fellow in the Humanities in Leadership Learning Series (HILLS) Postdoctoral Fellowship at Case Western Reserve University. Under the guidance of Dr. Joy Bostic, Dr. Tim Beal, and other expert administrative leaders at CWRU, she is learning best practices for how to lead in higher education as a humanist scholar. In the spring of 2022, she will teach a special topics course on Audre Lorde’s theories, literature, and legacies for the Minor in African and African American Studies in the Department of Religious Studies.

Loron’s dissertation, “Interior Spaces, Spiritual Traces: Theorizing the Erotic in the Cultural Works and Creative Lives of Black Women Writers and Artists, 1930-1970,” is an interdisciplinary study of the theoretical utility of the erotic as an epistemological source for spiritual and political power. Her article “Dripping in Molasses: A Black Feminist Exploration of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety”—which will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the Cultural Studies Journal—examines the artistic and historic bricolage of sugar, slavery, memory, and mammy in Walker’s 2014 public art installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Loron is currently working on her first book manuscript tentatively titled Spiritual Eroticism: Interiority, Artistry, and Activism in the Lives of Black Women.

Loron earned her Bachelor of Arts in English and Women’s Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, became a middle school reading teacher, and later completed her Master of Arts in Women’s Studies at Georgia State University. In 2020, she earned her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include Black women’s literary and political traditions, Black feminist theory, and the intersections between sexuality, creativity, and spirituality.