Maurice Wallace is associate professor of English at Rutgers. His fields of expertise include African American literature and cultural studies, nineteenth-century American literature, the history and representation of American slavery, and gender studies. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, a book on the history of black manhood in African American letters and culture, and is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of a volume of scholarly articles on early photography and African American identity entitled Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African-American Identity. Professor Wallace has served on the editorial boards for American Literature and Yale Journal of Criticism and is a contributing editor to James Baldwin Review. His current research and writing agendas include a monograph on the religious life and leanings of Frederick Douglass, and a critical exploration into the sound of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice. Professor Wallace also teaches in areas of visual culture and sound studies.

Photo by Sarah Cramer Shields

Major American Writers: Toni Morrison

Photography and Literature

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Power, Love, Justice

‘Black Is… Black Ain’t…’: Currents in African American Literary and Cultural Theory

Slavery and the Problem of Aesthetics

John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Fellowship, Duke University

William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature and Culture, Modern Language Association

“The Dream Keepers: William Bullard and New Negro Portraiture in Worcester Massachusetts, 1897-1917” introduction to Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, ed. Jannette Greenwood and Nancy Kathryn Burns, (Worcester, 2019) forthcoming.

“Race, Writing and Eschatological Hope: The Religious Roots of African American Literature, 1800-1830,” African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830, ed. Jasmine Cobb (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019), forthcoming

“’Precious Lord’: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel,” Religions. 10:4. ed. Carol E. Henderson (MDPI, 2019), pp. 1-13.

“The Pack-House Portraits,” introduction to Photos Day and Night, ed. Sara Stack (New York: Red Hook Editions, 2019), pp, 65-73.

1995 Ph.D., English Literature 
Duke University

1989 A.B., English Literature and African & African American Studies Cum laude. 
Washington University in St. Louis