Wm. Harrison Graves
Assistant Professor
I specialize in the arenas of 20th and 21st century American, African American literature and film, and I maintain an active research and teaching profile in literary, film, and Black studies, specifically African American literature, Black critical theory, psychoanalysis, & carceral studies.
My research project, tentatively entitled, “Dark Gardening in the Vertigo Cold: Black Masculinity and Ungendering in the Contemporary Literary and Cultural Imagination,” examines African-American-authored novels, memoirs, and films from 1965-present that theorize the experience of racialized gender as a form of cultural unbelonging. I focus on Black male gender as it appears to be a malleable category regulated in language, laws, and customs, which reflect the continued presence of racial slavery and colonial conquest. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family, The Case for National Action” (the Moynihan Report) serves as an historical anchor for gendered categorization that codifies Black masculinities as indolently excessive, pathological, nihilistic, and dangerous. My dissertation argues that antiblack narratives about gender exemplified in the Moynihan Report, intertextually haunt Black writers’ and artists’ complex treatments of Black gender from the Civil Rights era to the present. Overall, my research project examines the experience of racialized gender through literature, and how that effects the construction of Black masculinities.
Education
BA, English, University of Maryland (2014)
MA, English, University of Delaware (2017)
PhD, English Literature, Northwestern University (2024)
Publications/Research Listings
African American Literature, 1900-Present
American and African American Film