简介

I specialize in African American literary history from the eighteenth century to the present; U.S. literary history between the Civil War and World War II; race, ethnic, and cultural studies; and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography. I have written two books and edited eight more that altogether examine the longstanding negotiations of African American writers with racial representation—that is, with the formal and thematic process of portraying race in progressive ways, and thus with the question of how much this literary process exists in dialectical relation to political ideology and action. My writings have also tried to account more broadly for how American critics, cultural institutions, and commercial marketplaces have registered the aesthetics and politics of racial representation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For my scholarly work I have been awarded in 2010 a Walter Jackson Bate Fellowship in English Literature at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and in 2014 an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The courses I teach at Boston University cover these topics. Most of my courses aim to intersect African American literature with literacy, higher education, racial uplift, political activism, and law and civil rights. In recent years I have also focused on teaching graduate courses about postbellum American literature and the rise of corporate capitalism, in concert with my teaching of the English Department’s standard American literature survey from the Civil War to World War I, addressing such issues as national identity and democratic aesthetics; the racial politics of regionalism; domesticity and the literature of gender and sexuality; literary realism and the problem of representation; and literary naturalism and the ethics of capitalist modernity. All of this work feeds into my current scholarly project, a book about the literature, life, and times of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the first professional African American writer born after slavery. In addition to my activities as scholar and teacher at BU, I have served as Acting Director of African American studies from 2009 to 2010 and Chair of the Department of English from 2011 to 2014. Most recently, I have been appointed Associate Dean of the Faculty (Humanities) for a term ending in 2017.