After growing up in Hawai'i, Indonesia, and Tennessee, Brian Roberts received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2008. His scholarship and teaching focus on American literature's transnational relation to modernity, African American and black diasporan literature and culture, American Studies, archipelagic studies, and literature and diplomacy.

 

His first book--Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (University of Virginia Press, 2013)--examines the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers who traveled as US diplomats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing the interrelated spheres of racial, aesthetic, and international representation, Artistic Ambassadors brings the literary and diplomatic dossiers of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. The project further demonstrates how historical access to New Negro literary and cultural investments in official US diplomacy is crucial to understanding quasi-diplomatic moments in African American and black diasporan cultural history, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida Gibbs Hunt's orchestration of the Pan-African Congress and the Indonesian travels of Richard Wright for the Bandung Conference or Asian-African Conference. An article version of a chapter from Artistic Ambassadors received the MLA's Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year in African American Review.   

 

Professor Roberts has begun a second book, tentatively titled "American Archipelago: Modernism, Blackness, and the Islands of the Sea," which draws on the writings of authors including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Florence Frisbie, Carlos Bulosan, Harriet Monroe, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Carson McCullers to trace the ways in which island-space and American blackness intersected during late colonial modernity to produce an archipelago of interrelated modernisms spanning from London to Jakarta and from New York to Port-au-Prince.

 

 

Courses Taught

 

Undergraduate

AM ST 303: "American Studies History and Theory"

AM ST 304: "American Studies Methodologies and Writing"

ENGL 230: "Introduction to Literature"

ENGL 293: "American Literary History"

ENGL 314: "Writing about Literature"

ENGL 337R: "20th Century US Drama in Black and White"

ENGL 363: "Modernism and the American Archipelago"

ENGL 480: "Future Scholars Program"

ENGL 495: "Race, Performance, and 20th Century US Drama"

ENGL 495: "Literature of the New Negro Era"

 

Graduate

ENGL 628R: "New Negro, New Critical Geographies"

ENGL 628R: "Modernism and Archipelagic American Studies"

 

 

Books

 

 

Collections

 

 

Selected Articles

 

"Archipelagic Diaspora, Geographical Form, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." American Literature 85.1 (2013): 121-49.

 

"A London Legacy of Ira Aldridge: Henry Francis Downing and the Paratheatrical Poetics of Plot and Cast(e)." Modern Drama 55.3 (2012): 386-406.

 

Roberts, Brian Russell and Keith Foulcher. "Richard Wright on Bandung, Beb Vuyk on Richard Wright." Introduction. "A Weekend with Richard Wright." By Beb Vuyk. Trans. Keith Foulcher. Ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher. PMLA 126.3 (2011): 798–812.

 

"(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry." Arizona Quarterly 67.3 (2011): 91–118.

 

"Abolitionist Archipelago: Pre- and Post-emancipation Islands of Slavery and Emancipation." Atlantic Studies 8.2 (2011): 233-52. Reprinted in Abolitionist Places. Ed. Martha Schoolman and Jared Hickman. Routledge, 2013.

 

"Passing into Diplomacy: US Consul James Weldon Johnson and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." Modern Fiction Studies 56.2 (2010): 290–316.

 

"Lost Theaters of African American Internationalism: Diplomacy and Henry Francis Downing in Luanda and London." African American Review 42.2 (2008): 269–86. Winner of the 2009 Darwin T. Turner Award for Best Essay of the Year in African American Review.

 

"Reading Ralph Ellison Synthesizing the CP and NAACP: Sympathetic Narrative Strategy, Sympathetic Bodies." Journal of Narrative Theory 34.1 (2004): 88–110. Reprinted in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, New Edition. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. 7-24.

 

"Predators in the 'Glades: A Signifying Animal Tale in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Southern Quarterly 41.1 (2002): 39–50.

 

 

Recent and Upcoming Talks

 

(With Keith Foulcher) "Of Race and Nation: A 1955 Cultural Encounter between Indonesian Modernism and African American Transnationalism." Department of Anthropology, Monash University. May 2013. (Invited) 

 

(With Keith Foulcher) "Of Race and Nation: A 1955 Cultural Encounter between Indonesian Modernism and African American Transnationalism." Department of Indonesian Studies, University of Sydney. May 2013. (Invited)

 

"The Coloring of the Sea Almond and Other Archipelagic Legibilities." Critical Caribbean Studies Group, Rutgers-New Brunswick. April 2013. (Invited)

 

(With Keith Foulcher) “Indonesian Notebook: Richard Wright and Indonesian Cultural Modernism in the 1950s.” Southeast Asia Studies Seminar Program, Yale University. October 2012. (Invited)

 

“Insular Catachresis and the American Archipelago.” American Studies Association Convention. San Juan, PR, November 2012.

“Archipelagic American Studies: Leaving the Continent and the Robinsonade.” Modern Language Association Convention. Seattle, WA, January 2012.