Carter Mathes is a specialist in African American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s.  Currently, he is working on a second book project that examines practices of improvisation and formations of black radical thought in literature and music as they move between Jamaica and the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. He has published essays in Small Axe, Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, and African American Review.

Director, Rutgers Advanced Institute of Critical Caribbean Studies

• Black Literature and Sound
• Black Music and Literature
• Literature of the Black World
• The Black Arts Movement
• Twentieth Century Literature in a Global Context

• Post-1960’s African American Literary Experimentation
• Sound in African American Literary and Cultural Practice
• Caribbean Aesthetics

• 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

MLA

ASA

• "The mind is a strange and terrible vehicle": Fractured Time and Multidimensional Sound in No Name in the Street" African American Review 46.4 (Winter 2013): 587-604.
• "Love Won't Come Easy"  Callaloo 36.3 (Summer 2013) 595-599.
• "The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom"Sounding Out, April 2013.
• "The Cultural Politics of Caribbean Sound" SX salon: a small axe literary platform, August 2011
• "Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary" Small Axe, Number 32 (Volume 14, Number 2), June 2010 17-41.
• "Scratching the Threshold: Textual Sound and Political Form in Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters" Contemporary Literature 50.2 (Summer 2009) 363-396.

PhD, University of California, Berkeley
BA, University of Virginia

• "Carter A. Mathes" - New Faculty Profiles by Cheryl A. Wall 
  (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 1)