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Biography Information
My research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, critical race studies, poetry and poetics, and disability studies. I am currently revising a book manuscript entitled Fictions of Mobility: Performing Race and Nation in Modern American Literature that examines the relation between mainstream appropriations of black vernacular culture and emergent discourses of liberal inclusion. During my tenure as a Du Bois Fellow at Harvard, I also began work on a second project that traces the circulation of African American spirituals in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present. Archival research for Trading in Sorrow: Memory, Mourning, and the Practice of Solidarity has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, where I was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for the Best Dissertation Submitted in English. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Du Bois Institute and the Freie Universität Berlin, I joined the English Department at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 2011 as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor.
Project Description
This project examines the circulation of African American spirituals in Germany from the 1870s onward. Focusing on the global economies of historical remembrance, commerce, and sentimentality in which the “sorrow songs” take on local meaning, I ask how black vernacular forms facilitate modes of identification that exceed the nation. My research traces the legacy of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to the German concerts of contemporary African American musicians and explores black-Jewish analogies under the Nazi regime and in post-Holocaust memorial culture; the archive I assemble is at once literary, performative, and ethnographic. Bringing critical race and affect studies to bear on the transnational turn in American studies, Trading in Sorrow proposes the cultural distance traveled by the spirituals as an index of both the potential and the precariousness of a universalizing politics grounded in the particularity of racialized suffering.