Professor, Affiliate Faculty of African Studies,
For CV click here
Teaching and Research Interests
- Caribbean literature, especially poetry and drama
- Post-colonial literatures
- Seventeenth-century English literature; comparative literature
Selected Publications
- Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008)
- An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (1998)
- “Responsibility and Craft in the Poetry of Edward Baugh,” Journal of West Indian Literature 15: 1 & 2 (2006)
- “Creole Language in the Poetry of Derek Walcott,” Callaloo 28:1 (2005)
- “Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (2003)
- “How Shall the History of West Indian Literature be Told?” Journal of West Indian Literature 11:1 (2002)
- “‘Mabrak’: A Disappearing West Indian Classic?” Journal of Commonwealth Studies 34:1 (1999)
- “The Half-Life of Performance Poetry,” Journal of West Indian Literature 8:1 & 2 (1998)
- “The Caribbean: Laboratory for Cultural Studies,” American Studies (Tokyo) 3 (1998)
- “The Eighties,” West Indian Literature (1995)
- “Edward Kamau Brathwaite,” Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Authors, Second Series, Dictionary of Literary Biography 125 (1993)
- “How to Behave on Paper,” Journal of West Indian Literature 6:1 (1993)
- “Early Drama,” The Art of Derek Walcott (1991)
- “Italic Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in Invisible Cities,” Modern Fiction Studies 34:4 (1988)
- “The Ambivalent Aesthetic of Eric Roach,” Ariel 19:2 (1988)
- “The Career of the Cockatrice,” Isis 70:251 (1979)
- “The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne,” Modern Language Quarterly 38:3 (1977)
- poems in Agni, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Commonweal
Work in Progress
- Orality and Decolonization in West Indian Poetry: the Chemistry of Presence
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- Visiting Professor, American Studies, University of Tokyo (2004)
- Rockefeller Fellow, Center for Study of Black Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania (1991–92)
- ACLS Grant-in-Aid (1984)
- NEH Research Fellow (1980–81)
- ACLS/Social Science Research Council Fellow (1976–77)