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Ivy Wilson

Associate Professor of English

Ph.D. Yale University

Biography

Ivy Wilson (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQArizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national.


Specializations

American: 20th Century, American: Early/19th Century, Postcolonial, Diaspora Studies, Critical Race & Ethnicity Studies, African American Literature, Poetry & Poetics

Books

Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet
Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (co-editor, University Of Iowa Press, 2014)