Contact Information

Office: 4153 JFSB

Phone: 422-1376

E-mail: brianrussellroberts@byu.edu

Office Hours:
4153 JFSB MWF 3:00-4:00 or by appointment

Brian Russell Roberts came to BYU after completing a PhD at the University of Virginia in 2008. His areas of specialization include African American literature and culture, American Studies, and US literature after the Civil War.

Professor Roberts's essays are published or forthcoming in African American Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, and other venues.

His current book-length project, which grows out of his dissertation, 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, this project brings the literary and diplomatic dossiers of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson into dialogue with the work of the US's lesser-known black writer-diplomats.

Degrees