Gena E. Chandler

Gena E. Chandler is an associate professor and associate chair for the Department of English at Virginia Tech. She is a university award-winning teacher earning the 2015 Virginia Tech Certificate of Teaching Excellence Award, the 2015 College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Carroll B. Shannon Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2007 Diggs Teaching Scholar Award for teaching excellence. 

Dr. Chandler’s research interests include African American literature, American literature, postcolonial literature, pedagogy, and critical literary theory.

She has published articles on the work of Charles Johnson, including a piece in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and a piece in the edited collection Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher (2007). Her recent publications include an article in the journal Pedagogy (“Threat Assessment: Women of Color Teaching Ideological Critique in the Neoliberal Classroom”), and her book The Wanderer in African American Literature was published in 2020 by The University of Tennessee Press.