Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an associate professor at Santa Clara University. She specializes in African American literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries and is interested in the ways that literature, mass media, popular culture, and humor shape identity formation. In particular, her research and teaching reflect her interests in African American satire and comedy, the arts as activism, and the continuing influence of history on contemporary articulations of Black selfhood. As a professor at Santa Clara University, she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Ethnic Studies.

Danielle has written a variety of both scholarly and popular articles and has been interviewed on topics as varied as Black Lives Matter, race and The Twilight Zone, Black sisterhood in sitcoms, the satiric reappropriation of negative tropes, laughter as revolution, race and sexuality on the Broadway stage, and Beyoncé. Her book, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (published Fall 2020 by University of Illinois Press as a part of the New Black Studies Series), addresses the contemporary role of African American satire as a critical realm for social justice. She is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies (Oxford University Press) with Dr. Brittney Michelle Edmonds in addition to working on her second monograph.

Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications including on Racialicious, Al Jazeera, and Vulture, in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, Humanities, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Journal of Science Fiction, College Literature, and Post45 Contemporaries. She is a member of the Center for the Arts and Humanities Faculty Advisory Board and has served as the Frank Sinatra Faculty Fellow for the Center working with W. Kamau Bell and Taye Diggs. She is interviewed in the four-part documentary series, We Need To Talk About Cosby, which grapples with the legacy of comedian Bill Cosby and the question of whether it is advisable — or even desirable — to separate the art from the artist. The documentary premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and on Showtime. Danielle was also appointed to the Modern Language Association (MLA) Screen Arts and Culture Executive Committee (2023-2028).

Danielle earned her B.A. in English with a minor in African American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A.T. in secondary English education at Duke University. After teaching high school English, she returned to school and received an M.A. in English literature from North Carolina State University. She earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University with focuses in African American literature, African American studies, and American literature. She hails from Durham, North Carolina.