Courses
After the Harlem Renaissance (graduate and undergraduate seminars)
Modernisms in America (graduate and undergraduate seminars)
The Jazz Page: Modern Black Music and Modern American Literature (graduate and undergraduate seminars)
Writers and Critics as Intellectuals in 20th-Century America (graduate and undergraduate seminars)
Reconceiving the Harlem Renaissance (graduate and undergraduate seminars)
The Celtic and Harlem Renaissances (graduate and undergraduate seminars with Professor Joseph Valente)
Great Banned Books: American Writing and Literary Censorship
American Modernist Literature, 1914-1945
American Literature from World War I to the Present
American Literature from 1870 to the Present
The American Novel
(Writing about Literature): The American Radical Novel
(Major Authors): Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin
Independent Honors Study in American Literature (tutorials on the slave narrative, anthropological modernism, contemporary American poetry, Don DeLillo, Gary Snyder, Jean Toomer, and Ralph Ellison)
Areas of Interest
Modern American and African-American Literature; American Radical, Cultural, and Intellectual History; Critical Theory.
Publications
BOOKS IN PROGRESS.
FB Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Explores the secretly intimate relationship between FBI scrutiny and African-American literary experiment from 1919 to 1972, the years of J. Edgar Hoover’s long tenure as the Bureau’s critic-in-chief. Under contract to Princeton University Press.
The Claude McKay Reader. A collection of the Afro-Jamaican modernist’s work in poetry, fiction, letters, and journalism, some previously unpublished. Co-edited with Gary Holcomb. Under contract to Rutgers University Press.
BOOKS.
Edition with introduction and annotations of Claude McKay, Complete Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hardback: xliv + 405 pages. Reviewed in African American Review, Black Issues Book Review, The Crisis, The Daily Gleaner [Kingston, Jamaica], The Los Angeles Times Book Review, St. John’s University Humanities Review, TLS [The Times Literary Supplement, London], and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Hardback and paperback: xi + 254 pages; 14 illustrations. Named an Outstanding Academic Book of 2000 by Choice. Reviewed in African American Review, Against the Current, The American Historical Review, American Literary History, American Literary Scholarship, 1999, American Literary Scholarship, 2000, American Literature, American Quarterly, American Studies International, Choice, The Chronicle of Higher Education, College Literature, Dialogue, The Harlem Amsterdam News, The Journal of American Ethnic History, The Journal of American History, Journal of American Studies, Left History, the minnesota review, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, The Richard Wright Newsletter, Textual Practice, Word for Word, and The Year’s Work in English Studies, 2001.
CHAPTERS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES.
“Ghostreaders and Diaspora-Writers: Four Theses on the FBI and African-American Modernism.” In Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950. Ed. Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick. New York: Palgrave; forthcoming in 2008.
“Unfree Love: Claude McKay’s Lyric Interruptus.” Foreign Literature Studies [Wuhan, China], forthcoming in 2008.
“Dunbar’s Bohemian Gallery: Foreign Color and Fin-de-Siècle Modernism.” African American Review special issue on Dunbar; forthcoming in 2007.
“Harlem Polemics, Harlem Aesthetics.” In Teaching the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Michael Soto. New York: Peter Lang; forthcoming in 2007.
“Banjo Meets the Dark Princess: Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Transnational Novel of the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 170-83.
“Global Poetics and State-Sponsored Transnationalism: A Reply to Jahan Ramazani.” American Literary History 18.2 (summer 2006): 360-64.
“‘Creative and Cultural Lag’: The Radical Education of Ralph Ellison.” In The Oxford Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. Ed. Steven C. Tracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 59-83.
“Ralph Ellison and the Constitution of Jazzocracy.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16.1 (2004): 40-57.
“F.B. Eyes: The Bureau Reads Claude McKay.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States. Ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 39-65.
“Kitchen Mechanics and Parlor Nationalists: Andy Razaf, Black Bolshevism, and Harlem’s Renaissance.” In Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. Ed. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 219-37.
“‘Is It True What They Say About Dixie?’: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rural/Urban Exchange in Modern African-American Literature.” (Revision of “Down Home Chicago” [see below].) In Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Ed. Barbara Ching and Gerald R. Creed. New York: Routledge, 1997. 71-104.
“Black and White, Unite and Write: New Integrationist Histories of U.S. Literary Modernism.” the minnesota review 47 (fall 1996): 205-15.
“The Proletarian as New Negro: Mike Gold’s Harlem Renaissance.” In Radical Revisions: Rethinking 1930s Culture. Ed. Sherry Linkon and Bill Mullen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 91-119.
“Down Home Chicago: The Richard Wright-Zora Neale Hurston Debate, the Literature of the Great Migration, and the Rural Turn in Black Expressive Culture.” Black Heartland: African-American Life, the Middle West, and the Meaning of American Regionalism. Ed. Gerald Early. African and Afro-American Studies Occasional Papers Series, Washington University, St. Louis 1.1 (1996): 41-65.
“‘Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?’: Fear and Longing for the 1950s in the Attack on Multiculturalism.” High Plains Literary Review 7.3 (winter 1992): 70-90. Written with William J. Maxwell, Sr. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
“Sampling Authenticity: Rap Music, Postmodernism, and the Ideology of Black Crime.” Studies in Popular Culture 14.1 (fall 1991): 1-15. Winner of 1992 Whatley Award for best article of the year in journal.
ENCYCLOPEDIA AND ANTHOLOGY PIECES.
Headnote for selections from the poetry of Claude McKay. In An Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Jay Parini. 2 vols. New York: Thomson-Gale, forthcoming in 2007.
“The Lyrical Left.” In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Paul Finkelman and Cary Wintz. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2004. 752-55.
“Culture and the Crisis.” In Encyclopedia of the Great Depression. Ed. Robert S. McElvaine. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 2004. 221.
REVIEWS.
Jeffery B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. The American Historical Review, forthcoming in 2007.
Tracy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (autumn 2005): 295-96.
David Ake, Jazz Cultures. Callaloo 27.2 (spring 2004): 570-72.
Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922-1963. The Slavic Review 63.1 (spring 2004): 209-11.
Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, and Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. American Literature 75.3 (Sept. 2003): 659-61.
Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left. African American Review 36.4 (winter 2002): 687-89.
Maria Balshaw, et al., City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s. H-Amstdy, N-Net Reviews (17 May 2001). <http://h-net.msu.edu>; H-Urban Web Links Review (17 May 2001). <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~urban >
James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946. African American Review 35.1 (spring 2001): 143-45.
John Michael, Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values. Politics and Culture 2.1 (spring 2001): 6 pars. <http://laurel.
conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/>.
“Afro-Modernism in Brown.” Review-essay concerning Mark A. Sanders, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. The Mississippi Quarterly 53.2 (spring 2000): 301-06.
Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ, eds., Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. American Literature 71.1 (March 1999): 190-91.
ONLINE SITE.
Editor, Claude McKay home page associated with An Anthology of Modern American Poetry. (Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps>.
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University of Illinois