Professor

For CV click here

My research focuses on American literature, modernism, and black poetry of the Americas, and my approach, which emphasizes transnational and intercultural dialogue, is reflected in courses I have taught at all levels, including “Transnational Modernism,” “American Literature and Transculturation,” “American Poetry,” “Introduction to American Studies,” and “American Literature and World Cultures.”  My first book, From Emerson to King:  Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford UP, 1997) examined Emerson’s critical engagement with the dynamics of economic individualism and the debate over slavery, and showed how his writings fostered an abiding legacy of protest writing by African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.  In Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008), I developed a more global and comparative perspective.  Placing American literature in a New World context, I explored how the poetry of Whitman, Poe, Eliot, and Pound, along with their Francophone avant-garde contemporaries in the Caribbean and in Europe, influenced African American modernists such as Langston Hughes, as well as Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and Aimé Césaire.  I have edited a collection of essays on Daisaku Ikeda, a Japanese Buddhist philosopher and poet, exploring his engagements with Emerson, Whitman, and other American authors, and my current book project, American Japonisme and Modernist Style, continues with my interest in transnationalism, intercultural exchange, and the American contexts of literary modernism. Here, however, I study how the opening of Japan, and the widening popular appeal of Japanese culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, fostered an American literary tradition of transpacific exchange that extends from Emerson, Okakura, and T. S. Eliot up through the Chicago Renaissance and the haiku-inspired poetry of Richard Wright.

 

Selected Publications

  • Daisaku Ikeda, Transnationalism, and American Literature: Dialogues of the Heart (Routledge Press, 2026).
  • “T. S. Eliot’s Black Arts Legacy: Robert Hayden, the Middle Passage, and The Waste Land,” The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual1 (June 2024), 1-21.
  • “Emersonian Legacies of Black Resistance,” The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Christopher Hanlon (Oxford University Press, 2024), 224-240.
  • “Modern Poetry and Haiku,” Richard Wright in Context, ed. M. Nowlin (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 293-303.
  • “‘Careful Candors’:  Gwendolyn Brooks, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Social Critique,” Literature and Culture of the Chicago Renaissance, ed. Y. Hakutani (New York:  Routledge, 2019), 88-103.
  • “Eliot, Emerson, and Transpacific Modernism,” Modernities and Modernization in North America, ed. I. Brasch and R. Mayer (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018), 23-44.
  • “Deux poètes du Nouveau Monde:  Edgar Allan Poe et Saint-John Perse,” trans. C. Vottero,  Souffle de Perse 18 (Juin 2018):  41-52.
  • “T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism,” American Literary History (2015)
  • “Global America Revisited:  Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Modernist Japonisme,” Nanzan Review of American Studies (2011)
  • “1922:  T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence,” A New Literary History of America, ed. G. Marcus and W. Sollors (2009)
  • Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  • “Japonisme and Modernist Style in Afro-Caribbean Literature: The Art of Derek Walcott,” Review of International American Studies 2.2 (2007)
  • From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997)
  • Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  • “Japonisme and Modernist Style in Afro-Caribbean Literature: The Art of Derek Walcott,” Review of International American Studies 2.2 (2007)
  • From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997)

 

 

View all profiles