My first book-length project will investigate the nature of the “social” in “social realism” among Black Chicago intellectuals, writers, and artists throughout the New Deal era, World War II, and the early Cold War. How did these social actors build on and criticize standards of “racial authenticity” that informed cultural production during the famous Harlem Renaissance? How did they conceive of the relationship between empiricism and theory, surface and depth, authenticity and truth, and concrete and abstract realities in their work? And how did their intellectual and creative innovations keep social protest alive as WWII gave way to the political repressions of McCarthyism? Theorizing realism not as a taxonomic straitjacket but as a capacious and historically contingent epistemology, my study will cover a variety of genres where a race- and class-conscious “realist impulse” was at work—from fiction, poetry, and drama to social science, radio, and the visual arts.
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“The Disalienating Realism of William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge: Rethinking Black Chicago Renaissance Aesthetics.” African American Review 55.1 (Spring 2022): 51-67. doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0003
“‘Tightrope of Words’: Self-Censorship in Langston Hughes’ Account of the Spanish Civil War in I Wonder as I Wander.” Science & Society 81.2 (April 2017): 172-96. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2017.81.2.172
Book Chapter
“From the Sublime to the Grotesque: Red Langston Reconsidered.” Langston Hughes in Context. Eds. Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. 94-103. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009057783.011
Published Presentation
Co-authored with Magdalena J. Zaborowska. “Black Digital Humanities in Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Teaching on Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality.” HEAd ’23: 9th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (2023): 1433-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd23.2023.16101
Scholarly Reviews
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930, eds. Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed. Science & Society 85.4 (October 2021): 544-46.
Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond, eds. Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson. Science & Society 82.3 (July 2018): 451-53.
Recent and Upcoming Conferences and Talks
Presenter. Roundtable: “Teaching to Strike: Literary Studies in a World in Crisis.” Paper: “Jack London’s The Iron Heel and America’s Descent into Fascism.” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference. March 2026.
Presenter. Roundtable: “Radical Lineages.” Paper: “‘Intricate Patterns of Recurrence’: Realist Disalienation in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder.” Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference. January 2026.
Co-presenter (with Geordie Miller). Panel: “Odd Temporalities.” Paper: “‘Down Time’s Street’: Proletarian Internationalism and Langston Hughes’s Red Temporality.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference. May-June 2025.
Presenter. Panel: “Knowledge Production in Multiethnic Literature.” Paper: “The Streets as Laboratory: Black Radicals, Sociology, and the Illinois Writers’ Project.” MELUS Conference. April 2025.
Academic Affiliations
American Literature Association
American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
Richard Wright Society
Science & Society (Editorial Board)
Juan Rodríguez Barrera 