The latest news is here (updated Jan. 14, 1996).

Herman Beavers

Associate Professor of English and
Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
University of Pennsylvania
hbeavers@english.upenn.edu

This is his seventh year at the University. Professor Beavers did his doctoral work in American Studies at Yale University and received a Master's Degree in Afro-American Studies from Yale as well. He is a published poet, and completed an A.M. in Creative Writing from the Writing Program at Brown University. He has published a chapbook of poems entitled, A Neighborhood of Feeling (Doris Publications) and in May, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Professor Beavers's specialty is 19th and 20th Century African American literature, and he has taught courses in 20th Century American literature as well, most notably the course in African- and Jewish-American literature which he team teaches with Professor Elisa New called "Exodus and Memory" and "Intimacy and Distance: Faulkner, Hurston, Welty, and Wright" which deals with the racial and gender complexities to be found in Southern literature. In other words, he is deeply interested in the ways that literary texts engage in dialogue with other texts, the ways that a literary text can be multivocal as well as presenting multiple layers of history. In the classroom, Professor Beavers utilizes a pedagogy of engagement, which emphasizes the relationship between text and context as well as the ways the reader's experiences can provide tools to investigate the text more intimately.

Courses This Semester:

English 569

Courses in Previous Semesters:

English 89: American Fiction

English 284.401

English 288.401

[TOP | ENGLISH 281 INDEX]

Document URL: http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~hbeavers/index.html
Last modified: July 6, 2000