Africana Studies

My research and teaching focus on American and African American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth. My book Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2011) examines the development of the slave-marriage plot through close readings of literary fictions by writers such as William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Frances Harper, Frank Webb, and Charles Chesnutt. By doing so, I consider how this particular literary convention challenged the meaning and function of marriage in the United States. Currently, I am co-editing a volume of critical essays on the novelist Sutton E. Griggs entitled Literature, Jim Crow, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. Additionally, I am co-editing a critical edition of Griggs’s 1899 novel, Imperium in Imperio, forthcoming from the West Virginia Press.

My courses intertwine my research interests in various ways. In my “Introduction to the Black Novel in the United States,” (AFRS/ENG 107) I invite students to consider the interplay between political and aesthetic commitments that produce a distinct literary form that begins with the turn to fiction by former slaves (and their descendants) in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with the publication of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. “Reconstructing the Nation” (AFRS/ENG 258) asks students to consider the ways in which legal and political reforms were articulated through novelistic fictions set in the southern United States written between 1865 and 1890.