(Associate Professor, Folklore) received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of a book on African-American men's poetry, Deep Down in the Jungle. He helped to create the field of modern folklore study, specifically the performance-theory style of research, which moved to study folklore not as isolated texts but as socially- contexted expressive events. He continues to work on African-American folklore of various kinds, and has recently been interested in the theory and study of display events (festivals, protests) and of marketplace culture. He also continues to work on the development and history of folklore theory. He teaches classes on Festival Theatre on behalf of the Theatre Arts Program.

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...)

Tsitsi Jaji earned her Ph.D. (2009) in comparative literature from Cornell University with concentrations in African, Caribbean and African-American literature in English, French and Spanish. Her dissertation was entitled Africa in Stereo: Comparative Black Acoustic Imaginaries In Poetry And Film From Ghana, Senegal And South Africa, and she is currently building on this material towards her first book. She has published articles and/or book chapters on Nafissatou Diallo, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, and most recently Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile (Comparative Literature Studies 46:2), as well as a handful of poems in obscure but treasured small press journals.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Dr. Jaji has conducted fieldwork throughout Southern and West Africa, with generous support from the TIAA-CREF Ruth Sims Hamilton Fellowship, and has been a Mellon Mays Undergraduate  (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...)

Yolanda Padilla is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  Her area of specialization is U. S. Latina/o literature and culture, with additional interests in hemispheric studies, border studies, race and ethnicity in literature, and in questions of literary production and reception.  She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the role of the Mexican Revolution in shaping early Mexican American letters and politics.  The project studies relatively neglected authors such as Ricardo Flores Magon, Josefina Niggli and Luis Perez, and more familiar writers such as Americo Paredes and Jose Antonio Villareal.  She has coedited (with William Orchard) The Plays of Josefina Niggli:  Landmarks of Latino Literature (Wisconsin, 2007).

Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. Her book Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008) reads a history of American literary alliances with East Asia, from Walt Whitman to Myung Mi Kim. Her present research examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by twentieth-century conflicts between the United States and East Asia. Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, modernist poetics, theories of race and subject formation, immigration, and transnationalism.

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.