Profile picture for user Amber Sweat

Amber Patrice Sweat

Doctoral Candidate
ambersweat@berkeley.edu
CV
Dwinelle 4314
(Spring 25) Tuesday 4-5; Thursday 3-4

Research Areas

The Black French Atlantic; children and girlhood studies; digital humanities; affect theory; feminist theory.

Biography

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I’m in the final year of the PhD with a designated emphasis in Film and Media and certificates in Global Urban Humanities; Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education; Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I am also an adjunct faculty member at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

As an educator and researcher, I question what it means to come of age in an era where we live to be seen. Black girls are central to my work, given their relative absence from the canon, a genealogical refusal to look at themselves or others (starting with Claire de Duras’ 1823 Ourika), and the pronounced usage of self-imaging technologies by Black girls on- and offline. Coming-of-(im)age, set to become my first monograph, examines moments where Black girl protagonists catch a glimpse of themselves via screens: the Photomaton, phone selfies, augmented reality filters, and supernatural elements of texts-as-screen. Analyzing novels and films by Gisèle Pineau, Maïmouna Doucouré, Mati Diop, and Marie NDiaye among others, I argue that a girl’s moment of self-recognition is vital, for it shows how a screened life does not necessitate a split between the self, body, and image. Instead, I argue that a self-imaging moment triggers a return to the flesh and its senses beyond the visual; this is especially crucial for racialized girls, since photoimaging’s racial biases cleave, flatten, or distort her image. Further, this corporealization happens with the audience via formal methods that emphasize kinesis and viscera. I show how these moments make readers and viewers shiver, become breathless, elicit particular textures, and pique an interest in the body, its limits, and its possibilities in an age where both bodies and texts are existentially complicated by the digital, augmented realities, and artificial intelligence. I enjoy writing clauses in dyads and triads!

When I can, I also enjoy exploring and teaching on the Black American expatriates–Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and the elusive Marpessa Dawn, to name a few. For fun, I also like to think about net communities' engagement with literature and media. I am currently sketching out a few public-facing pieces, including a project on r/BooksThatFeelLikeThis.

I received my MA from Berkeley in 2020 and come to California by way of an Honors BA in French and History at UT Austin. Before Berkeley, I also held a research internship at l'Université de Paris (Sorbonne-IV), Centre Roland Mousnier. I was in the 2017-2018 cohort for the Teaching Assistant Program in France (aka TAPIF) in Aubervilliers, France. I am a Chancellor's Fellow and former Gérard Fellow, and I was happy to recieve honorable mention from the Ford Foundation in 2023. I was a research assistant for the Universal Design Working Group in 2023, and I also undertook funded research with the Center for Race and Gender. I hold former affiliations with the Berkeley Transformative Justice Group and the Mellon-Berkeley Law and Humanities Symposium.

More than anything, I'm a very proud first-generation student of Black/Pinay ancestry. I was raised and heat-tested in Texas. I have a penchant for coffee shops, cycling, and distance running, and I patiently await the tell-all memoirs of children who were born into social media fame. 

You can also find me at ambersweat.com. Furthermore, my GoogleScholar is here. 

Selected Publications

First Author/Reviews

As Co-Author

  • (2025, forthcoming) Faidley, E., Weiher, R., Sweat, A., Davidson, J. “Framing Higher Education Social Movements: The Case of the University of California (UC) System.” 

Translations