Kianna M. Middleton's research examines 20th and 21st century literary representations of Black disabled and queer people in African American fiction and within American medical literatures and archives. Middleton is currently working on her first manuscript wherein she theorizes a Black feminist disability framework to account for the ableist and racist intersex medical protocols developed during the United States' post-World War II era. Toward a fuller accounting of race, intersex, and disability, Middleton puts medical literature in conversation with intersex-led fictional novels from American Ethnic literatures.

Middleton was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for the John E. Sawyer Seminar at the University of Kansas, titled Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing, Healing the Body in Global Africa. Middleton was a doctoral recipient of the John Money Fellowship for research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at the University of Indiana's Kinsey Institute. Her recent publication, "Blackened Vulnerabilities in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex" appeared in The College Language Association Journal's much anticipated special issue on disability: Blackness and Disability: This. Is. The Remix. Or I Thought I Told You That We Won't Stop (2021). Additionally, she was awarded the Friedman Feminist Press Collection research grant from Colorado State University for her research on Black lesbian feminist poetry published feminist newspapers (particularly Denver, CO's Big Mama Rag) and feminist journals of the 1970s-1980s. 

Middleton is co-organizer of "Then You Don't Want Me": Canonizing Gayl Jones, A Symposium, a collaborative project between the Gayl Jones Archival Collection at Boston University's Gottlieb Library; California State University, Fullerton; and the University of California, San Diego.