Recent Ph.d. graduates
Wendy Elizabeth Grant
Wendy E. Grant received her B.A and M.Phil degrees in French and French Caribbean Literature respectively from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She was also awarded the A.M degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2006. Wendy's research interests include Caribbean migrant narratives, the literary portrayal of parent-child relationships, and the formation of West Indian immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Wendy's dissertation is on the representation of intergenerational relationships in novels written by Lakshmi Persaud, Merle Collins, Edwidge Danticat, and Paule Marshall.
Email: wgrant@fas.harvard.edu
Michael Jeffries
Michael Jeffries is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. At Wellesley, Michael teaches courses on race and politics, hip-hop studies, the sociology of sport, and the cultural significance of Barack Obama. His published work includes research on hip-hop feminism (in Home Girls, Make Some Noise! (2007)), and racism and interracial dating (in The Du Bois Review (2006)). Current projects include a book manuscript on how everyday listeners define hip-hop and interpret rap music, and an article about representations of love in hip-hop thug performances. A native of Brooklyn, NY, and South Orange, NJ, Jeffries holds an A.B. in Sociology/Anthropology from Swarthmore College. He has received multiple fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Organization, and worked in conjunction with two non-profit organizations, The Opportunity Agenda, and The Fund for an Open Society. To view his CV, please click here.
Email: mjeffrie@wellesley.edu
Cameron Leader-Picone
Cameron Leader-Picone received his Bachelor’s Degree from Yale University in African American Studies and holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University. Cameron is currently revising his dissertation, Rinehartism: Representations of Blackness in Contemporary African American Literature for publication. While Cameron’s primary research area is contemporary African American Literature, his wide ranging scholarly interests include popular cultural studies, ethnic American literature, and music. He is currently working on black popular fiction, including books published by Holloway House in the 1960s and 1970s as well as current “street lit.” He is also working on articles about the influence of hip hop in American popular culture and the relationship between race and the experience of hip hop music as well as moving beyond the discussion of race in literature as simply an analysis of fiction by African Americans or African American characters through a discussion of constructs of whiteness in contemporary American fiction.
He is currently working on turning his dissertation, Rinehartism: Representations of Blackness in Contemporary African American Literature, into a book. The project examines how various African American authors have attempted to define blackness in their narratives as well as addressing the implications of such definitions, particularly in relation to issues of community formation and racial leadership. Authors have challenged both essentialist notions of race and refused to embrace facile post-race notions by crafting multiple formulations of racial constructs that embrace rather than resist flux.
His argument also engages with efforts to periodize the post-Civil Rights Era, both aesthetically and socially. While, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thinkers such Trey Ellis drew on the black power era concept of a “Black Aesthetic,” calling new developments the rise of a “New Black Aesthetic,” Ellis’ discussion of “cultural mulattos” who were equally capable of discoursing about mainstream white culture as black culture is but one element among many in contemporary racial discourse. Similarly, authors such as Aaron McGruder and Paul Beatty extend discussions of a “post-soul” culture, discussed by Mark Anthony Neal and Nelson George, among others, pointing to the burden that comes with the successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power generation, forcing contemporary African Americans to attempt to advocate in the shadow of icons such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The representations of race found within these works of art are not at all unequivocally positive evocations of a new narrativised and malleable racial identity, but also reflect the deep challenges facing a community that lacks a static definition of what constitutes it, particularly in relation to who will continue to lead and advocate for change, as such change remains to be made.
These discussions of race have attempted to address changing dynamics within the black community, serving to emphasize the myriad lines along which any previous conceptions of a unified blackness seem fallacious, from class to gender to sexuality to a growing mixed race identity. However, what an examination of a range of artistic productions by African Americans illustrates is that African American artists, in dealing with representations of race that attempt to avoid problems of reification, have maintained the importance of race as a functional discourse that is constantly shifting in order to take into account the porous boundaries of any racial community. Moving beyond Paul Gilroy’s articulation of an “anti-anti-essentialism” that maintained that race retains its relevance due to social structures that continue to consider it in structuring social hierarchies, these authors represent race as a dynamic structural, social and experiential element.
On its most basic level, his book attempts to address the dearth of scholarship about African American Literature published from the late Civil Rights era to the present. While there has been work addressing particular authors, particularly Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison, there have been only limited criticism addressing the depth and diversity of African American Literature published in the last forty years. Book length treatments of the topic, such as Madhu Dubey’s Signs and Cities and W. Lawrence Hogue’s Race, Modernity and Postmodernity, focus much of their attention on situating recent works of African American Literature in relation to broader trends in American literature, particularly postmodernism. While these authors do an admirable job of opening discussions of contemporary African American literature, their own critical methodologies preserve the sanctity of canonical formulations. By examining both canonical authors (such as Charles Johnson and Ishmael Reed) as well as works from popular culture and multiple mediums, he argues for a critical discussion of contemporary African American literature as dynamic and diverse as the works it examines.
While his project is rooted in literary criticism, he is currently working on expanding its discussion of African American popular culture including further analysis of popular fiction, particularly the street fiction of authors such as Zane and Sistah Souljah, as well as analyzing the relationship between the racial constructs he analyzes in contemporary African American Literature and the hip hop music that is central to the popular conceptions of blackness in America. His analysis of hip hop supplements the portrayals of hip hop culture in his chapter on the work of Paul Beatty and Aaron McGruder, and draws on analysis by scholars such as Tricia Rose and Imani Perry.
Email: cleader@fas.harvard.edu
Laura Murphy
Laura Murphy's areas of specialization include West African literature, 19th and 20th century African American literature, slave and neo-slave narratives, theories of memory, and modern-day slavery. Her dissertation entitled, "Enduring Memory: Metaphors of the Slave Trade in West African Literature," [abstract] examines the representational strategies that West African authors have utilized to explore long-term memories of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. She has recently published articles on the literature of Amos Tutuola, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo in Research in African Literatures, Studies in the Novel, and The Journal of the African Literature Association. She also has an article forthcoming on the depiction of modern day slavery in the HBO television series, The Wire. Laura is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Ithaca College in New York and acts as a consultant and organizer for Free the Slaves, a non-profit organization dedicated to the abolition of modern-day slavery.
Email: ltmurphy27@gmail.com
Jennifer Christine Nash
Jennifer Christine Nash's work focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, and the intersection of race, gender, and visual culture. Her dissertation, "The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography" [abstract] analyzes hard-core pornography's representation of black women's bodies from 1970-1990. Jennifer has published reviews and articles in Social Text, Feminist Review, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Wisconsin Women's Law Journal, and Cardozo Women's Law Journal. She was the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies and Harvard University's Whiting Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and she was a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research during the 2008-2009 academic year. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Jennifer is a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University's Society of Fellows. At the conclusion of her fellowship at Columbia, Jennifer will begin her appointment as Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies at George Washington University.
Email: jennifer.nash@gmail.com
Josef Sorett
Josef Sorett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. He works as an interdisciplinary historian of religion in America, with a particular focus on black communities and cultures in the United States. His research and teaching interests include American religious history, African American religions, hip hop and popular culture, the arts, religion in the arts, and the role of religion in public life. Josef earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University in 2008, and he also holds a B.S. from Oral Roberts University and an M.Div. from Boston University. He is currently at work on a book project that explores the significance of religion and spirituality in debates regarding racial aesthetics. You can learn more about Josef at his website: http://www.josefsorett.com/. (You also can view an abstract of his Ph.D. dissertation, Spirit Soundings: Religion, Race and the Arts in Twentieth Century America.)
Email: js3119@columbia.edu