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Biography

I was born in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, but I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. I earned a B.A. in English from University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, VA, and came just shy of completing minors in Music (oboe) and African-American Studies. I earned a doctorate and master’s degree in English and a Women’s Studies Certificate at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. My background is in mid-nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century African-American literature and American literature and postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean literature and theory, and my other areas of specialization are eighteenth-century African-American literature, women’s studies, and performance studies. Recently, NEH Institute “Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African-American Poetry” has renewed my interest in poetry and poetics.

Prior to coming to Salisbury University in 2011, I taught at Haverford College and the Pennsylvania State University, Abington College. I also have quite a bit of professional experience with Writing Center tutoring and grass roots organizing, so I have participated in as well as studied social justice movements. I am President of the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (which I helped found) as well. In addition, I am coordinator and founder of the Department of English’s Ethnic and Global Literatures Minor and Chair of SU’s African-American History Month Committee.

Teaching

I began teaching in 1999; I have taught composition, women’s studies, literature, and summer bridge courses. In addition to traditional college classroom pedagogy, I have utilized online learning, learning communities, and experiential learning. While at SU, I have incorporated online components and experiential learning into my courses and taught a hybrid course. I regularly teach ENGL 250 Understanding Poetry, ENGL 253 The Short Story, ENGL 382 African-American Literature I, ENGL 383 African –American Literature II, and ENGL 470 Topics in African-American Literature, and ENGL 386 American Women Writers of Color. I also teach graduate courses: ENGL 570 Topics in African-American Literature and ENGL 510 Seminar in Literature Special Topics.

Teaching Philosophy: A Summary

I aspire to practice this philosophy, but, alas, I am not always successful.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/05/05-00.html

Research

My primary mission as a scholar is to intervene in the practice of studying African-American literature primarily through the context of the dominant culture and the historical American literature canon. In all of my work on African-American literature, I attempt to foreground the influence and presence of African-American discourses, histories, and culture(s). I have several projects in the works. I am in the process of revising articles on Mrs. A.E. Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine; or, God’s Way, (1890) which is considered to be the first African-American children’s novel and the poetry of Native American platform performer E. Pauline Johnson.

In addition, I am writing a book formerly titled Theorizing and Performing Representation: African American Women Writers 1850-1900. It began as a study of the performance of gender and sexuality in works by four African-American women writers -- Frances Harper, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins -- who were also public figures. In my dissertation, I examined what I named the “politics of representation” in these texts, whereby their authors articulated the benefits and drawbacks of capitalizing on the dual socio-political positions of subject and object in American culture. Black women’s authority, for Harper, Wilson, Jacobs, and Hopkins, stems not simply from affirming their womanhood, heterosexuality, racial affiliation, or cultural identification; it exists in their ability to subvert all notions of innate, transparent identity and the tying of such perceptions to political recognition. I believe that Pauline Hopkins was one of the first African-American intellectual leaders to theorize various types of performance as political acts, anticipating the work of W.E.B. Du Bois during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. However, the book is evolving into a broader study of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African-American male and female writers’ articulation of African-American quotidian and professional performance (drama, recitation, lectures, readings) as a political strategy.

SU Links

Ethnic and Global Literatures Minor (forthcoming)

http://www.salisbury.edu/academic/degrees.html

African-American Literature Research Guide

http://libraryguides.salisbury.edu/content.php?pid=425922

The Nabb Center

http://nabbhistory.salisbury.edu/

American Women Writers of Color Conference

http://www.salisbury.edu/english/awwoc/home.html

April Logan