Having done my graduate training in American Studies, I approach my work in Chicago’s English department as a literary historian. This background and commitment shape my work in several ways.

First, I research and teach literary texts as cultural products shaped by the material processes of their times. Since I believe that social, political, economic, and cultural formations inform what the domain of “the literary” encompasses as such, my work is indebted to the idea of historical materialism as theorized by Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Raymond Williams. Second, in my view American literary history encompasses a comparative canon of writing. Thus, my specialization in African American literature means that I read Black texts and Euro-American works in critical dialogue with each other. Third, questions of aesthetic form—or, more precisely, genre—orient me towards the historical issues that compel my attention. Fourth and last, to address these sorts of questions I actively weave my close readings of literary texts with cultural analysis of print and visual primary source materials, given my deep and abiding fascination with archival investigation as a research method.

I bring these habits of mind to bear on the issue that compels me most: those junctures in American literary and cultural history where the nation’s “cultural secrets”—the peoples, events, artifacts, or processes that influence prevailing ideologies and practices but are not regarded as such—coincide with the radical re-imaginings of material life that literature offers in the special ways it can as art.

My first book, A Spectacular Secret: the Cultural Logic of Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006) follows from these interests. In it, I consider how aesthetic representations of lynching in fiction, poetry, and photography bear within their compositional structures a “secret” or otherwise buried history of the violence, a history that implicates this practice of racial terrorism with pivotal developments in American modernity.

Currently, I’m compiling a critical edition of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which will be published by W.W. Norton & Company in fall 2009.

Gwendolyn Brooks Courtesy of POETRY Magazine

My new monograph project builds upon my first book because, like A Spectacular Secret, it is concerned with literary production during regimes of racial repression. However, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s focuses on the regenerative aesthetic life that, paradoxically, Jim Crow segregation gave rise to. Three questions inspire this project. Why is it that during the 1940s and 1950s Black writing across the genres—the novel, poetry, drama, and the essay—became so immensely popular and received as “American” art? How, though, could this turn of literary events occur when racism’s ill effects permeated national society so thoroughly? Finally, what distinguished Chicago (compared to New York City and London) as a magnet for this cultural experiment? Put another way: what kind of muse was Chicago to mid-20th century African American writing that Harlem was not? Finally, I direct “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives” (MTS) a research initiative that was inspired by my work toward Birth of the Cool. To learn more about this project, visit our website at: mts.lib.uchicago.edu. In partnership with the University’s Special Collections Research Center, Mapping the Stacks’ work has been underway since 2006 and will continue through to December 2009.

Selected Publications & Awards:

A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago, 2006) Winner, 2007 William S. Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Assn. Finalist, 2007 Lora Romero First Book Award, American Studies Assn. “‘Keeping the Secret of Authorship’: A Critical Look at the 1912 Publication of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1998) “The High and Low-Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till” (1996) “‘I Disguised My Hand’: Writing Versions of the Truth in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and John Jacobs’ ‘A True Tale of Slavery’” (1995)