Alyssa Collins

Alyssa Collins is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.

She is the recipient of a yearlong Octavia E. Butler Fellowship for the study of the renowned science fiction writer. Collins’ project is titled “Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontologies.” Her project treats Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy of novels as a central touchstone and explores Butler’s interest in genetics, evolution, and cellularity. Collins uses “cellularity” to refer to Butler’s engagement with the story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells were harvested without consent in 1951 for medical research and became known as the HeLa immortal cell line, and Butler’s representation of cellular replication as a mode of Black feminist survival.