Excellence Recognized
Double
congratulations to English Professor Brent Edwards, who won
both the 2003 FAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to
Undergraduate Education and the 2003 Board of Trustees
Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. The former is given to
reward outstanding teaching and service to the Rutgers undergraduate
community, while the latter award recognizes recently tenured
professors whose scholarly work shows exceptional promise.
With wide-ranging research and teaching interests in modernism,
the Harlem Renaissance, colonial and postcolonial theory,
science fiction, and black experimental music and writing,
Professor Edwards has already won a Curriculum Development
Award for his ability to bring densely interconnected scholarly
work into the classroom. His recent work examines the relationship
between jazz culture and other forms of black expression,
a topic he has developed in published essays, lectures, and
highly rated courses like “Black Music and Literature”
at Rutgers.
Professor
Edwards’s first book, published in 2003 by Harvard University
Press, is The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation,
and the Rise of Black Internationalism. In this book,
he looks at international alliances and collaborations between
black intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. He argues that
the African diaspora (the dispersion of people away from their
native homelands), which began as a historical condition,
has remained important as a set of intellectual and artistic
practices. The book examines the print culture created by
a wide variety of editors and writers who were working, individually
and collaboratively in both New York and Paris, to re-imagine
the meaning of race across barriers of nationality and language.
Reviewers have called the book “nothing short of a masterpiece”
and “an exciting, innovative and extremely important
study,” noting, “the combination of its theoretical
adeptness, its rigor, and its depth of scholarship is quite
remarkable.”
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