Prior to joining St. Olaf College in Fall 2023, Dr. Horton was Assistant Professor of English at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. She received her Ph.D. in English at Northeastern University and her B.A. in English and African American Studies at Temple University. Her areas of specialization include Black Feminist Theory, African American Literature, Hip Hop Studies, Black Atlantic Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Multiethnic Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Rhetoric. 

As Associate Editor of The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, Dr. Horton recently co-published "Funk What You Heard: Hip Hop is a Field of Study," which asks scholars to move beyond contextless lyrical analysis and treat Hip Hop Studies as a credible field with a rich history. She also published Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives (Rowman & Littlefield - Lexington Books 2022), which provides an innovative conceptual framework for describing representations of slavery in twenty-first century American cultural productions. It examines representations of black women slave-owners in post-neo-slave narratives to argue that they are portrayed as commodities who commodify enslaved people, a fluid and complex characterization that is a foundational aspect of postmodern identity and emphasizes how postmodern identity restructures the conception of slave-owners. She recently published a peer-reviewed journal article, ""You Will Sell the Negress!": Using the Post-Neo-Slave Narrative to Revise Representations of Women in Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave," in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present). 

Dr. Horton's current book project “Don't You Fuck with My Energy”: The Occult and Intersectional Spirituality in Hip Hop Culture is an autoethnography that uses her spiritual journey as a framework for examining the occult and intersectional spirituality in hip hop culture. A chapter from this book project ("'The Illuminati Want My Mind, Soul, and My Body': Occult Knowledge in Hip Hop") is forthcoming in Global Hip Hop Studies (2023). It argues that occult knowledge is crucial to understanding hip hop's fifth element (knowledge), and scholars should consider how rappers' usage of occult knowledge challenges familiar social justice/liberation conceptions of the element. 

At St. Olaf College, Dr. Horton teaches Black Science Fiction, Hip Hop Literature, Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies, Introduction to Race and Ethnicity Studies, and Writing and Rhetoric. As a professor, Dr. Horton strongly advocates for using popular culture as a pedagogical tool that can help students understand the course material, recognize the connection between the course content and cultural events, and dismantle the boundaries between the classroom and the community. Dr. Horton encourages students to take an autoethnographic approach to the course material and to see the value in connecting their personal experiences to the course content. 

In her free time, Dr. Horton enjoys riding her bike, playing volleyball, watching documentaries, collecting purple items, and taking long walks with no particular destination in mind.