My scholarship and teaching focuses on American and African American literature from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in the way that debates about literary form and genre articulate with discussions of political and social change. My two books, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago, 1993) and So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago, 2003), explore how various understandings of black/white racial difference have affected, and continue to affect, the way that American authors write about and pass critical judgment on American literature. So Black and Blue explores the uncomfortable possibility that our desire to value the work of twentieth-century American authors—even those authors who, like Ellison, set out to challenge the nation's racial status quo—might, paradoxically, tend to underwrite our commitment to a racially unequal social order.

The various courses I teach have reflected my interest in genre, the politics of race, and the relation of culture to politics. "The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow" (ENG 258/458) asks students to consider the role played by some of the major novels of the late 1940s and the 1950s in undermining the nation's commitment to racial segregation. My course in "American Literary Realism" (Eng. 267) compares and contrasts the way that novelists, philosophers, and scientists address the problem of representing accurately the world we inhabit.

---

Selected Publications:

---

• Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago, 2003).
• "Still on the Lower Frequencies: Invisible Man at 50" The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation (Fall 2002).
• "As White as Anybody: Race and the Politics of Counting as Black," New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000).
• "A Inevitable Drift?: Oligarchy, Du Bois and the Politics of Race Between the Wars." "Sociology Hesitant," a Special Issue of boundary 2 Fall 2000.
• "The End(s) of African American Studies." "History in the Making" a Special Issue of American Literary History 12.3 (2000).
• "Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora," in Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds. Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Duke University Press. Duke University Press, 1993.
• "Thinking Beyond Catastrophe: Leon Forrest's There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden. Callaloo 16.2 (1993) 409-418.
• "The Problem of Anthologies, or Making the Dead Wince," in "Forum: What Do We Need to Teach?" American Literature 65.2 (1993) 338-342.
• "From Under the Superscript: A Response to Michael Awkward." American Literary History, 4.1 (Spring 1992).
• "Frederick Douglass's Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency." Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric Sundquist. New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1990.

Langston Hughes, Letter to Poetry Magazine Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Chicago

Contact Information: Department of English The University of Chicago 1115 East 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Office: Walker 507A Office Phone (773) 702-9761 Fax (773) 702-2495 kwarren@uchicago.edu