New Faculty Fall 2006

Erica R. Edwards earned her Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University after completing undergraduate study in English and Spanish at Spelman College.  Her teaching and writing mobilize social and literary theory to interrogate the intersections of African American expressive culture, political ideologies, and the shifting constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in contemporary American culture.  She has published pieces in Transforming Anthropology and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and is currently at work on a book project entitled Contesting Charisma: Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture, which provides a radical critique of political authority that reads novels and films of twentieth-century black culture as texts that contest the charismatic model of leadership.

Stéphane Robolin received his Ph.D. in English from Duke University (2005) and did his undergraduate studies at Tulane University . He has taught courses on African, African American, African diasporic, and British literatures at Duke University , Wake Forest University , and Rutgers University . In addition to contemporary South African and African American literatures, his research interests include African diaspora studies, comparative race studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory.

Robolin’s published and forthcoming essays include “Loose Memory in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story” (Modern Fiction Studies 52.2, forthcoming), “Gendered Hauntings: The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory” (Research in African Literatures 35.3), and “‘Constructive Engagement’: Remapping South African and African American Imaginaries” (African Diasporas: Race, Citizenship, and Modern Subjectivities, forthcoming). He is currently at work on a study of the literary and cultural connections between South Africans and African Americans entitled Constructive Engagements. 

Sterling Brown Visiting Professor of African-American Studies, Fall 2006
Ted Gordon, Director of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), University of Texas at Austin. Publications include Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

KARA KEELING: B.A., University of Notre Dame, M.A. and Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh. Media and Cultural Studies. Dr. Keeling's current research and teaching interests involve articulating, interrogating, and challenging the logics of racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalist exploitation currently perceptible in images and circulating via various media. That work includes forging and examining intersections between media studies (especially film and television theory and criticism), cultural studies, critical theory (including Marxist, poststructuralist, queer, feminist, postcolonial, and Black liberation theories), Black studies, and women's studies. Her essays on media and popular culture have appeared in The Black Scholar, Qui Parle and elsewhere.

 

Leslie Wingard, earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.A. in English from Spelman College.  Her current research focuses on the tension between sacred and secular interests in black film, media, and literature.  She has held dissertation fellowships from the English department and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and the Religion department and Program in Africana Studies at Haverford College.  She has taught 19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture, Civil Rights Literature and Culture, and Religion and African-American Literature at UCLA, Princeton, and Haverford.