In the book review, the New York Times declares Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Lawrence Jackson’s research "unimpeachable." Chester B. Himes: A Biography is "neatly written and accessible, without cheap tricks to build suspense or sway readers’ opinions."

The English department is delighted to welcome Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Christopher Cannon to Johns Hopkins. Christopher Cannon works on medieval literature and, in particular, the emergence of ‘English literature’ as a meaningful category.  He has traced that emergence conceptually (in the intellectual contexts in which it developed), philologically (in the history of English) and, comparatively […]

The latest issue of the Johns Hopkins Magazine features an interview with Professor Mark Thompson about his new book, Kafka's Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

Professor Chris Nealon’s Heteronomy is built out of five long poems, including The Dial. Together they form an overlapping set of mediations on love and friendship and political life.

The English Department is delighted to welcome our new colleague, Associate Professor Nadia Nurhussein. Professor Nurhussein joins us from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she taught for several years after receiving her PhD. From UC Berkeley. She will also be teaching in the Center for Africana Studies. Professor Nurhussein’s first […]

Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience.

Professor Jared Hickman’s new book, Black Prometheus, argues that certain features of the Prometheus myth–its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology–made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the […]

The English department is delighted to welcome Professor Lawrence Jackson to Johns Hopkins. Lawrence Jackson is the author of My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (Chicago 2012), The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton 2010) and Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 (Wiley 2002). […]

Professor Mark Christian Thompson’s new book, Kafka’s Blues, proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the “Negro” (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in […]