Contact Information

Office: 4153 JFSB

Phone: 422-1376

Email: brianrussellroberts@byu.edu

Semester Schedule: Spring 2012:

Not teaching Spring 2012

Other University Assignments:
Graduate Advisor for American Literature Section

Student Consultations:
By appointment

Biography: Brian Russell Roberts arrived at BYU in 2008. He specializes in African American literature, American Studies, and American literary modernism.

His first book--New Negro Ambassadors: Literary, Racial, and International Representation (U of Virginia P, forthcoming)--focuses on the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers who traveled as US diplomats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining the interrelated spheres of racial, aesthetic, and international representation, the project brings the literary and diplomatic dossiers of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black writer-diplomats of the New Negro era.

He has begun a second book project on modernism, American blackness, and the islands of the sea.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate
AM ST 395: "American Studies Theories and Methodologies"
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: "American Modernism and Terraqueous Literary Studies"



Selected Publications

New Negro Ambassadors: Literary, Racial, and International Representation (U of Virginia P, forthcoming spring 2013).

"Archipelagic Diaspora, Geographical Form, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." American Literature, forthcoming.

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

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. Eds. 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. (Special issue: "Abolitionist Places," eds. Martha Schoolman and Jared Hickman)

"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.

Degrees: PhD, U of Virginia, 2008

Interests: African American literature; American literary modernism; American Studies