Research & Innovation

With the emergence of a culture of images in the early twentieth-century, the question of how literature engages the visual arts has become key for literary studies. This extended treatment of poetic ekphrasis (the verbal representation of visual representation) explores the complex, dynamic relationships between words and images that characterize this flourishing genre and provided one way of making poetry new. Elegantly and persuasively written, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts considers a wide range of twentieth-century poets from several English-speaking cultures, from W.B. Yeats and Marianne Moore to Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Rita Dove.

Press info: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (hardcover), 2011 (paperback)

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gothamis Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City.

Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow.

Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

Edited by Amy E. Leonard and Karen L. Nelson

This interdisciplinary volume includes essays and workshop summaries for the 2006 Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men symposium. Essays and workshop summaries are divided into four sections, "Masculinities," "Violence," "Childhood," and "Pedagogies". Taken together, they considers women's works, lives, and culture across geographical regions, primarily in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, the Caribbean , and the Islamic world and explore the shift in scholarly understanding of women's lives and works when they are placed alongside nuanced considerations of men's lives and works.

List of Contributors
Susan D. Amussen, Jeanice Brooks, Margaret D. Carroll, Sarah R. Cohen, Margaret Ferguson, Valeria Finucci, Amy E. Leonard, Randall Martin, Caroline P. Murphy, Alexandra Shepard, and Judith E. Tucker.

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States.

Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass's The North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded.

For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.

What happens when the disciplines make themselves heard in the discussions of learning outcomes assessment that are ubiquitous in higher education today? What do disciplinary perspectives and methodologies have to bring to the table? This volume engages these questions from the perspective of literary study, with essays by education leaders, faculty from English and foreign language departments, and assessment experts that offer a wide range of perspectives. Together, these essays take a pulse of a discipline. They explore what is at stake in the work of assessment in the literature classroom, what we stand to gain, what we fear to lose, and whether current assessment methods can even capture the outcomes we care about most: the complex, subtle, seemingly ineffable heart of learning. They also implicitly invite teachers and scholars in other disciplines to come to the table, and carry the discussion further. 

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as 'property' within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters -- all of whom are slaves -- in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all. The documents in this edition include excerpts from Brown's sources for the novel -- fictio, political essays, sermons, and presidential proclamations; selections that illuminate the range of contemporary attitudes concerning race, slavery, and prejudice; and pieces that advocate various methods of resistance and reform.

Revised and updated from the 2000 edition.

I've begun to reflect more critically on my practice as a blogger and to think more broadly about what blogs are, what they do—culturally, politically, and literarily—and what they can teach us about reading, writing, and social networking in the twenty-first century.

Argues that the networks largely ignored Mexican American activism during these decades, and when they did cover the movement, they tended to represent it not as a complex campaign for equality, but as one of several forces destroying America from within.

This is the first book to explore the multitude of narrative media forms created by and that feature Latinos in the twenty-first century - a radically different cultural landscape to earlier epochs. The essays present a fresh take informed by the explosion of Latino demographics and its divergent cultural tastes.

In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film