Directory

Faculty Research

• 20th-century visual arts
• African American art history and literature
• Folklore
• Film
• Popular culture

Faculty Teaching

• Contemporary America (AMS 231)
• African American Folk Art (AMS 321)
• African American Art (AMS 341)
• Writer & Artist in America (AMS 421/521)
• Popular Culture in America (AMS 422/522)
• Race & Essentialism in American Culture (AMS 492/592)
• American Folklore (AMS 492/AMS 592)
• Art Worlds & American Values (AMS 492/592)

Books

• Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
• Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.

Journal Articles

• “‘Anything I Can Stick a Needle In’: An Interview with Yvonne Wells.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 31 (2011): 63-104.
• “Hughie Lee-Smith and Cold War Aesthetics of Alienation.” International Review of African American Art 23.1 (Spring 2010): 16-25.
• “‘John Henry Had a Little Woman . . .’: Race and Gender Ideologies in the Adaptations of a Folk Legend, 1931-1947.” Columbia Journal of American Studies (2007): 55-93.
• “Clementine Hunter and Melrose Plantation.” American Art 19 (Spring 2005): 25-28.
• “Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker.” College English 63.6 (July 2001): 712-740.
• “‘The Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science’: Race Science and Essentialism in George Schuyler’s Black No More.” CLA Journal 42.3 (March 1999): 331-352.
• “Dust Tracks Untrampled by the Dinosaur of History: The Ibo’s Landing and Flying Africans Narratives as Mythic Counter-Memory.” Sycamore: A Journal of American Culture 1.1 (Spring 1997).

Reviews

• The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. By Mary Helen Washington. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.  In Resources for American Literary Study 39 (2017).