Professor of English
Research Areas: American literature; modernism; black poetry of the Americas; transnational and intercultural dialogue;
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. 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:
American Japonisme and Modernist Style (in progress)
“Emersonian Legacies of Black Resistance,” The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024)
“‘Projections in the Haiku Manner’: Richard Wright, T. S. Eliot, and Transpacific Modernism,” T. S. Eliot Studies Annual (2021)
“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)
Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997)
For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Patterson’s Department Profile.