- Contributors
Michael Borshuk (michael.borshuk@ttu.edu) is associate professor of African American literature and the Director of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech University. He is the author of the book Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006) and the editor of the forthcoming collection Jazz and American Culture (Cambridge UP). He has also published widely on African American literature, American modernism, and music. For ten years he wrote on jazz regularly for Coda magazine.
Austin Busch (abusch@brockport.edu) is associate professor of early world literatures in the SUNY Brockport English Department and serves as Director of the Honors College. He holds a double PhD in comparative literature and classical studies from Indiana University. He normally publishes on Roman imperial and ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament. This is his first article on modern literature.
Joseph Darda (j.darda@tcu.edu) is an associate professor of English at Texas Christian University and the author of Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (U of Chicago P, 2019).
Yuan Ding (Dingx237@umn.edu) holds a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota (2019). She is currently an independent scholar and a full-time business analyst. Her book project is titled “Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia.”
Alexander Eisenthal (alexeisenthal@gmail.com) completed his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. His dissertation was titled “Non-Native Grounds: Jewish Writers in American Empire.” It surveyed the impact of imperial geopolitics on Jews’ experience of US assimilation. His article here is loosely adapted from that larger project. After finishing his doctoral studies, he returned to London, where he works in community mental health and social care.
Tracy Floreani (tafloreani@okcu.edu) is professor of English at Oklahoma City University, where she teaches American literature, academic writing, and interdisciplinary courses on race and ethnicity in the US. She also serves as Director of the Center for Interpersonal Studies through Film and Literature, the university’s public humanities programming initiative. She is the author of Fifties Ethnicities: The Ethnic Novel and Mass Culture at Midcentury (State U of New York P, 2013) and is working on a biography of Fanny McConnell Ellison.
Mark Griffin (mgriffin@okcu.edu) is professor of Spanish at Oklahoma City University, where he has taught since 1996. He coauthored the book Living on the Borders: What the Church Can Learn from Ethnic Immigrant Cultures (Brazos P, 2004), has published several articles in the areas of border studies and Latin American literature, and coproduced the documentary Here for Good: The Latino Experience in Oklahoma (2016). In addition to his writing, he has led community engagement projects with/in the Latinx community in Oklahoma City. His research focuses on national identities and the major dilemma faced by immigrant minorities of how to navigate between the twin perils of cultural loss and cultural isolation. Born and raised in Mexico, his creative work focuses on the personally experienced phenomenon of crossing borders.
DeLisa D. Hawkes (ddhawkes@utep.edu) is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty of the African American Studies Program at The University of Texas at El Paso. She is currently working on her first book project which focuses on genealogy and racial representation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature. She has published in North Carolina Literary Review, Journal of Traditions and Beliefs, and has a book chapter in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Hawkes’s research and teaching interests include nineteenth- to twenty-first-century African American literature, African American and Native American studies, genealogy, historical and speculative fiction, and visual culture.
Tara Kohn (tkohn@wells.edu) is an assistant professor of art history at Wells College. She was the 2017–18 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art History at Bowdoin College, and her work has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her article “Elevated: Along the Fringes of 291 Fifth Avenue” was named Honorable Mention for the 2019 Director’s Essay Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, and her research has appeared in American Art, Panorama: Journal of...