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Erin Royston Battat

Erin Royston
Battat
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Spring 2009
Title / Appointment: 
Ph.D. Candidate
Location: 
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R
Telephone: 
617-384-8342
E-Mail: 
emrbattat@gmail.com

Biography Information

 Erin Royston Battat received her Ph.D. from the History of American Civilization program at Harvard University in 2008.  She received her master’s degree in English from Harvard University in 2002, and her bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997.  Recent publications include “Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century” Literature Compass (March 2007), as well as contributions to the African American National Biography.  An article on the role of the fugitive slave narrative in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is forthcoming in an edited collection on the novel.  Her research interests include migration and immigration, social movements and protest literature, the intersections of race and class, and the American West.  She has taught in the program in History and Literature at Harvard University, as well as in the Core curriculum.  Battat is also involved in Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program for adults on probation in the Boston area.

Project Description

‘Ain’t Got No Home’: Race and American Migration Narratives in the Depression Era

The saga of the displaced southerner who migrated to the North and West fascinated Americans during the 1930s and 1940s, appearing in a variety of texts, from fiction and music to the mass media.

Taking a novel comparative approach, ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ examines how these texts revised American national identity and participated in a broad social movement that linked economic injustice and racial discrimination.T hese Depression-era texts reject the American success story, calling into question its myths of progress.  They imagine a new national story that encompasses, however tenuously, both black and white Americans. 

Asserting a connection between migration and consciousness, moreover, these migration narratives show how geographic displacement prompts a radical politics and poetics.  Many of these texts are sites of dissent that advance the aims of the working-class and African American social struggles in the aesthetic realm, imagining interracial alliances that counter the historical reality of race relations.  Examining the “long civil-rights movement” and its economic dimensions through the lens of culture, ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ probes the link between literary forms and social change.

During my tenure at the Du Bois Institute, I will also be conducting preliminary research on a second book project that explores one of the most profound injustices in American society in the past century—its prison system.  This project asks the questions, how do cultural narratives in the United States make the incarceration of millions of people seem to be necessary and inevitable, and what narratives work against this culture of coercion?