Nadia Nurhussein is Professor in English and Africana Studies, specializing in African American literature and culture. She is the author of Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (The Ohio State University Press, 2013)​.

Prior to arriving at Johns Hopkins, Prof. Nurhussein taught in the English departments at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, from 2005 to 2016 and at Mount Holyoke College from 2004 to 2005. In 2004, she earned her PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the American Council of Learned Societies.