Visiting Scholar: Gene Jarrett, April 1, 2013

Please join us on Monday, April 1 at 11:30am for our next Mellon workshop!  We will meet in the English Department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315).  We are delighted to welcome (back!) Professor Gene Jarrett, Professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University, as our final visiting scholar to join us at the Mellon.  Professor Jarrett specializes in African American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present; intellectual and literary history of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries; race, ethnic, and cultural studies; and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography.  He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (NYU, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Penn, 2007).  Jarrett has also edited and co-edited six volumes on African American literature and criticism, including most recently A Companion to African American Literature (Blackwell, 2010), The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio UP, 2009), and The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton UP, 2007).  Jarrett's current project is a monograph on the life, literature, and times of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.

We will be reading selections from Professor Jarrett's recent book, Representing the Race, along with a 2012 article on "The Harlem Renaissance and its Indignant Aftermath: Rethinking Literary History and Political Action After Black Studies."  All readings, and additional readings from Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011), are available on the google site (log-in required).  With generous co-sponsorship from the Graduate Student Council, Professor Jarrett will deliver a paper entitled "Beyond Literacy and Literature: Rethinking Political Histories of Slavery, Agency, and Freedom" as part of his visit to the workshop.  Please join us for Professor Jarrett's paper, lunch, and the workshop!