B.A., Virginia; Ph.D., California (Berkeley)
Professor Mathes is a specialist in African American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. He is currently writing a book entitled, Imagine the Sound: Experimental Form in Post-Civil Rights African American Literature. This study examines the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the shifting racial climate of the 1960s-1980s. Analyzing the work of writers such as Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Larry Neal, Gayl Jones, and John Edgar Wideman, his project situates literary explorations of sound alongside practices of twentieth century aesthetic experimentation, as well as within longer historical traditions of black cultural expression.
He is presently a member of the Rutgers Committee on New Directions in Caribbean Studies and is planning a second project that focuses on the circulation of black radical thought between Jamaica and the United States during the late 20th century.
Awards:
NEH Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2008-2009
Rutgers SAS Global Opportunity Award, 2008-2009
Center for Cultural Analysis Faculty Fellow, “Cultures of Circulation,” 2006 |
