Regular Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Race, Black Studies, transnational studies, multilingualism

Research Interests

Nineteenth-century American literature and culture; theories of culture, race, and sexuality; world literature and cultural studies; transnational and translational approaches to literature.

Biography, Education and Training

I am a scholar of race and slavery in the United States, the Americas, and beyond. From my usual base in the nineteenth century, I approach the study of national literatures and cultures from a “worlded” perspective developed by the cluster in World Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSC. My first book – focusing on Mark Twain’s lifelong interest in identity and imposture - explores his engagement with the changing systems of racial classification in the late nineteenth-century US. My second book considers the mode of “American race melodrama,” which I contextualize as part of the “culture of the occult,” a quasi-political meeting ground for both race radicals and conservatives. My current book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022, reaches into hemispheric and ocean studies with a project tracing the strange career of the term “American Mediterranean,” a combined scholarly metaphor and folk geographical concept, appearing and disappearing in multiple disciplines, genres, and languages, a point of departure for a comparative critical study of the Americas.

Selected Publications

• “Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans,” in eds. Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, et al, Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio
• “Oceans of Longue Durées,” PMLA 127-2 (March 2012): 328-34.
• “Whose Protest Novel? Ramona, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Indian,” in ed. Russ Castronovo, The Oxford Handbook to Expanding Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• “Networking Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Hyper-Stowe,” in eds. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
• “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network,” co-authored with Kirsten Silva Gruesz, in eds. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, A Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2011).
• “His Hundred-year Book,” review of Autobiography of Mark Twain-Vol. One, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith et al (University of California Press), Times Literary Supplement (December 10, 2010), p. 7.
• “Is He Dead?”, Times Literary Supplement (June 4, 2010), cover story, 3, 4, 7.
• “Otra vez Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation/Translation/Americas Studies” (American Literary History 20: 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 187-209. Translated into Spanish, Casa de las Américas, April-June 2008.