My first monograph will investigate the nature of the “social” in “social realism” among Black Chicago writers 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 and drama to social science and radio.
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Literary Interracialism at Midcentury: Arna Bontemps, Jack Conroy, and the Wartime Popular Front.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Forthcoming.
“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 Chapters
“Black Radicals in the Illinois Writers’ Project: Intellectual Labor, Sociology, and Chicago’s New Literary Awakening.” Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Representation, and Archive. Eds. Michele Fazio and Maureen Curtin. Forthcoming.
“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.
Reference Works
“Attaway William (1911–1986).” Dictionnaire mondial des littératures prolétariennes (1917–1939) [World Dictionary of Proletarian Literatures (1917–1939)]. Eds. Anthony Glinoer and Victoria Pleuchot. Montreal: M Éditeur. Forthcoming 2027 (in French).
Forums and Symposia
“Jack London’s The Iron Heel and America’s Descent into Fascism.” Cultural Logic. Forthcoming November 2026.
Book Reviews
Reading the Renaissance: Black Women’s Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932–1953, by Mary I. Unger. Science & Society. Forthcoming.
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.
Public Scholarship
“Langston Hughes, Nationalism and the Internationalist Horizon: Viewing America at 250.” Against the Current 243 (July/August 2026): 23–27. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc243/langston-hughes-nationalism-the-internationalist-horizon-viewing-america-at-250/.
Recent and Upcoming Conferences and Talks
Invited Faculty Participant. Invited faculty roundtable: “Literary Achievements.” Remarks: “Black Radicals in the Illinois Writers’ Project.” The Federal Writers’ Project: New Directions for Research, Teaching, and Public Engagement (virtual). July 2026.
Participant. Roundtable: “Teaching to Strike: Literary Studies in a World in Crisis.” Remarks: “Jack London’s The Iron Heel and America’s Descent into Fascism.” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference. March 2026.
Participant. Roundtable: “Radical Lineages.” Remarks: “‘Intricate Patterns of Recurrence’: Realist Disalienation in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder.” Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference. January 2026.
Academic Affiliations
American Comparative Literature Association
American Literature Association
American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Northeast Modern Language Association
Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
Richard Wright Society
Science & Society (Editorial Board member)
The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Juan Rodríguez Barrera 