Dr. Martin's forthcoming monograph, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), treats the conjure woman as a folk hero and literary archetype within the African American Literary tradition. Her research engages the ways African American authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Tina McElroy Ansa have shifted, recycled, and reinvented healing women in twentieth century fiction. Arguing that the conjure woman is one of the most adept agents of mobility, resistance, and self-determination in the realm of African American womanhood, the objective of Dr. Martin's study is to construct a historiography of the conjure woman in literature, which investigates various representations, the authority of power, the negotiation of gender and body politics, as well as how African-based spirit work often conflicts and merges with Christian doctrines.
She is busy researching and writing a second monograph, tentatively titled Envisioning Voodoo: African Diasporic Religion in the Popular Imagination, 1985-2010 which queries the impact of inscribing African diasporic spirituality on the black female body in American popular culture.
Other areas of interest include the novels of Tina McElroy Ansa, Toni Morrison, Sea Island culture, black women and the blues tradition, genealogical research, and the writing of family histories.
She is a member of the National Council for Black Studies, South Atlantic Modern Languages Association, College Language Association, and the Atlanta Metro Chapter of the African American Historical and Genealogical Society.
Dr. Martin was raised as a "military brat" and thus, has no one place she calls home. She has resided in Detroit, Omaha, Okinawa, Little Rock, Atlanta, Albany (GA), Tallahassee, and Los Angeles at various points in her life. Her ancestral roots, however, are in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a mother, wife, sister, daughter, scholar, poet, Sagittarius, child of Shango.
