Contributors
- Contributors
Jonathan Arac is Harriman Professor and chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and also a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective. His publications include Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (1987) and "Huckleberry Finn" as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (1997). His essay in this issue is the beginning of a larger inquiry into the emergence of identity as a major term in American intellectual discourse.
Kevin Bell is an assistant professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University. He works in philosophical aesthetics, British and American literary modernisms, and African American literature and film. He has just completed a book manuscript entitled The Language of Wanting: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identitarian Violence.
Adam Gussow is an assistant professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. For twelve years, he was the harmonica-playing half of Satan and Adam, a Harlem-based duo that toured internationally and recorded three albums on the Flying Fish label. Gussow's first book, Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998), won the Keeping the Blues Alive Award in Literature from the Blues Foundation in Memphis. His second book, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, was published last year.
Ronald A. T. Judy is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses related to the fields of American literature and culture, African literature, Arab literature, contemporary Islamic thought, global English studies and literature, as well as literary theory, with a particular focus on modernism. He is a member of the editorial collective of boundary 2, and was the guest editor of a special issue of boundary 2 on the philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois, entitled Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. Du Bois, which was awarded second place in the category of Best Special Issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. [End Page 221] He is currently completing a book project tentatively called The Last Negro or the Destruction of Categorical Thought: An Experiment in Hyperbolic Thinking.
Robert G. O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University and has been the director of Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies since 1999. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Essays on Jazz, and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998), which was awarded the Deems Taylor Prize by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 1999. O'Meally was nominated for a Grammy, for his work as coproducer of the five-CD box set called The Jazz Singers (1998). He lives in New York with his wife Jacqui Malone and their sons Douglass and Gabriel.
Donald E. Pease is the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College. The author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context and the editor of eight volumes including The American Renaissance Reconsidered, Cultures of United States Imperialism (with Amy Kaplan), Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon, Postnational Narratives, and, most recently, The Futures of American Studies, Pease is the general editor for the New Americanists book series at Duke University Press, the founding director of the Summer Institute for American Studies at Dartmouth, and the head of Dartmouth's Liberal Studies Program. In the Hilary term of 2001, Pease served as the Visiting Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at Oxford.
Barry Shank teaches comparative ethnic and American studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. His new book, A Token of My Affection: A Cultural History of American Greeting Cards, is forthcoming. He is beginning an investigation of the sonic strategies of abstraction and embodiment in the music of Yoko Ono.
Hortense Spillers is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English at Cornell University. During academic year 2002-2003, she was a guest professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University. A collection of her essays, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, was published in April 2003. She...
