3.9 Koritha Mitchell: On Know-Your-Place Aggressions and Cultivating Connections

Koritha Mitchell is is a public intellectual, a professor of English, a literary historian, an award-winning author and cultural critic, and as of last year she is also a member of the Hopkins Press Advisory Board. Her work has already had quite an impact both within the academy as well as in the larger public sphere. Her article "Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care", which was published in African American Review in 2018, has impacted both the academy and the mainstream. Thousands of readers are still finding the article each year, making it one of our consistently most-read Hopkins Press Journal articles on Project MUSE. In our recent Hopkins Press Podcast interview, Mitchell defines her groundbreaking concept of "know-your-place aggression" as "a reaction to the success of people who are not supposed to be successful," and the idea has resonated into recent articles about Junot Diaz in Chronicle of Higher Education and Shedeur Sanders in Esquire, and a 2024 interview with Mitchell published in Public Books brought her work to the attention of numerous new readers. Over the years, Mitchell has been a prolific contributor to several of the journals that call Hopkins Press home, including Callaloo, African American Review, American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.