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 […]

Professor Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s new book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, has just been released from Bloomsbury Press. South African Literature’s Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world’s most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing’s “Golden […]

The English department is delighted to welcome Professor Andrew H. Miller to Johns Hopkins. Professor Miller, an expert in Victorian studies, attempts, in his research, to show the ways that literary forms make valuable trouble for our thought about various issues, especially those pertaining to human psychology, moral philosophy and history. Professor Miller comes to Hopkins from Indiana University, where for […]