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.

Lynn Festa specializes in eighteenth-century literature and culture, with an emphasis on the role played by literature and literary form in the elaboration of categories of human difference in Britain, France and their colonies.

Her first book, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins, 2006), examined how the culture of sensibility welded the affective response to other people to broader structures of classification in order to both include and exclude individuals from the class of humanity. Her second book, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Penn, 2019), drew on riddles, fables, novels, scientific instruments, and trompe l’oeil painting to analyze the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed. Fiction Without Humanity won the 51^st annual James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association and the Oscar Kenshur Prize for the best interdisciplinary book in eighteenth-century studies from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, and has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and Public Books as well as in academic journals. With Daniel Carey, she co-edited The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory.   Festa is the author of more than 25 articles and book chapters on a wide array of topics, including slavery, human rights, it-narratives, cosmetics, and a 1796 tax on dogs. Her article, “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” was awarded the James L. Clifford Prize for best article by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Festa teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on eighteenth-century British and French literature; the history of the novel; narrative theory; colonialism, empire and the history of slavery; travel narrative; the Enlightenment understanding of human difference; animal studies; thing theory; the history of sensibility; eighteenth-century women writers, and Jane Austen. With David Brewer, she co-taught a Summer Seminar in the History of the Book on “Books in the Larger World of Objects” at the American Antiquarian Society in 2014. She received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at Harvard and a Graduate Teaching Prize at the University of Wisconsin. She has served as Director, Associate Director, and Director of Admissions for the Rutgers English Graduate Program.

 Festa has been the recipient of numerous national fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard, an ACLS Charles A Ryskamp Research Fellowship, the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, the NEH Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and a National Mellon Fellowship. She has given more than 120 talks nationally and internationally, including the North American Scholar Plenary lecture at the Jane Austen Society of North Ameria.

"In my teaching, I try to give students a sense of what makes the eighteenth century exciting and relevant to our historical moment, but I also want them to see how deeply alien it was. This was a period whose technologies, belief systems, and social structures were completely unlike those that construct the modern world. Part of why I love teaching eighteenth century texts is because of that electric contact with a way of thinking that is so emphatically not our own."

• "Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things"
  Eighteenth-Century Life 33.2, Spring 2009
• "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Tahitian Jouissance" 
  Romance Quarterly 54.4, 2007
• "Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century"
  Romance Eighteenth-Century Life 29.2, Spring 2005

• "Lynn Festa: New Faculty Profile" by Michael McKeon 
  (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 2)