Herman Beavers has taught at Penn since 1989. He is the author of Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, which was published in 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He also has a chapbook of poems, A Neighborhood of Feeling (1986) from Doris Publications. His most recent poems have appeared in Callaloo, Cross Connect, and Peregrine.  His most recent critical publications deal with the work of Charles Johnson, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.  Professor Beavers teaches courses in African American and American literature, including courses on Southern Modernism, 20th Century African American Poetry, and "Trading Fours:  The LIteratures of Jazz," which is a requisite course in the Jazz and Popular Music minor.  He also teaches the introductory poetry workshop in the Creative Writing Program.    Professor Beavers believes that his courses are much more about  (more...)

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction.

She is the author of Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including the Penguin Classic editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992). She is currently writing a  (more...)

David Kazanjian received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. from Stanford University. His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century. His additional fields of research are political philosophy, continental philosophy, colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. His book The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota, 2003) offers a comparative study of colonial and antebellum, racial and national formations, and a critique of the formal egalitarianism that animated early U.S. citizenship. He has co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003), as well as (with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through  (more...)

Salamishah Tillet received her B.A. in English and Afro-American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1996) and her M.A.T. in English Education from Brown University (1997). She earned her A.M. in English and American Literature in 2002 and her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 2007. Her manuscript titled "Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination" examines how contemporary African-American artists and writers reconstruct "sites of slavery" as a metaphor for their post-Civil Rights political identities. Her research interests include twentieth-century African-American literature and visual and performance arts, cultural studies, and feminism.