"In the classroom, I aim for an interdisciplinary line of inquiry that allows historical knowledge and cultural theory to inform close textual analysis. My general goal is to create a setting in which students passionately, critically, and respectfully participate in the collaborative production of knowledge. I work to establish an environment of high expectation and high engagement with black cultural production, so that students take the subject matter and themselves seriously, while always remaining open to the element of intellectual surprise. As a result, participants in a course—myself included—tend become stronger thinkers and writers with a genuine sense of accomplishment."

• African Literary Theory
• Black (In) Translation
• Black Literature in Motion
• Defining the African Diaspora
• Imagining Africa
• Postcolonial African Literature
• Principles of Literary Studies: Narrative
• Race, Culture, Colorblindness
• Race, Gender, Space
• South African and American Intersections
• South African Literature
• South African Women Writers
• Theories of Black Liberation
• Very Contemporary African Literature

• Comparative Racializations
• (Post)Colonial Spaces of African Literature
• Space, Place, & African Literature
• South African Literature

• Humanities Plus Grant, 2023.
• Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 2021-22.
• African Literature Association First Book Award (Scholarship) for Grounds of Engagement, 2017.
• “Rethinking the Shape of African Studies” Working Group Grant. Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs (GAIA), Rutgers University, 2016-18.
• Faculty Fellow, Sawyer Seminar: “Race, Space, and Place in the Americas.” Center for Race & Ethnicity, Rutgers University, 2012-13.
• Faculty Fellow, Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) Seminar: “Narratives of Power,” Rutgers University, 2011-12.
• Outstanding Mentor Award for Fostering Inclusive Academic Excellence, Williams College, 2009.
• Faculty/Administrator of the Year, Minority-Coalition/Multicultural Center, Williams College, 2008.
• Graduate Student Teaching Award, African & African American Studies Program, Duke University, 2003.
• Stephen J. Horne Teaching Award, English Department, Duke University, 2003.

• African Literature Association
• African Studies Association
• American Comparative Literature Association
• American Studies Association
• Modern Language Association

• “Mphahlele’s Writing in the Whirlwind.” Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele. Eds. Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2022.
• Translations of poems by Lucille Clifton into French: “bénédiction des bateaux,” “je suis accusée de m’occuper du passé,” “après le pays d’oz,” and “pourquoi certains gens m’en veulent parfois.” Europe : Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 1101-1102 (janvier-février 2021): 314-16.
• “Introduction.” The Joys of Motherhood. Novel by Buchi Emecheta. 2nd Edition. New York: George Braziller, Inc., [1979] 2013. 1-6.
• “Of Color and Blindness in Invictus.” Roundtable on film Invictus. Safundi: A Journal of South African and American Studies 13.1-2 (January-April 2012): 120-25. (Special Issue: Beyond Rivalry)
• “Black Transnationalism: 20th-Century South African and African American Literatures.” Literature Compass 9.1 (2012): 80-94.
• “Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Safundi: A Journal of South African and American Studies 12.3-4 (July-October 2011): 349-71. (Special Issue: Zoë Wicomb, the Cape and the Cosmopolitan)
• “Remapping South African and African American Cultural Imaginaries.” Global Circuits of Blackness: Race, Citizenship, and Modern Subjectivities. Eds. Percy C. Hintzen, Jean Muteba Rahier, and Felipe Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 127-51.
• “Loose Memory in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 297-320. (Special issue: Toni Morrison)
• “Gendered Hauntings: The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory.” Research in African Literatures 35.3 (Fall 2004): 76-92.

Brad Evans is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is the author of two books, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature (2005) and Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (2019). He co-produced the restoration of In the Land of the Head Hunters, a 1914 silent feature film directed by the photographer Edward Curtis and starring an all-indigenous cast from the Kwakwaka’wakw community of British Columbia, Canada. The film is now listed in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. He has for many years led the Pragmatism Working Group at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. His new project is tentatively titled Missed Connections: “Relational Aesthetics” from Henry James to Felix Gonzales Torres. It considers the various ways that artists since the 1850s have taken up the remarkably difficult challenge of representing relations.

American Literature Survey 1865-Present
Principles of Literary Study, Fiction
19th Century American Literature
19th Century Black Literature
American Realism and Naturalism
Early 20th Century American Literature
The Short Story
The Cultural History of Now: Inequality, The New Gilded Age?
English Honors Thesis Proseminar
Seminar: American Vernacular
Seminar: Black Writing at the Fin de Siècle
Seminar: Henry James
Seminar: Henry James, Edith Wharton and the Ends of Realism
SAS Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar: What is Culture?
Byrne Seminar: The Paris Art Scene in 1900, Reading The Ambassadors
Byrne Seminar: Restoring A Silent Film
Byrne Seminar: What is Culture?
Byrne Seminar: The Fault in Our Fiction: John Green and Literary Criticism Today

Relational Aesthetics and American Literature
Franz Boas v. William James: Pluralism at the Turn of the Century
Circulation and Cultural Theory
Post-Bellum/Pre-Harlem
Locating American Realism
Local Color
An Infidelity to Realism
American Literature 1860-1925
From Balzac to Noguchi: American Literature 1860-1910
Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the Ends of Realism

• ACLS Fellowship, 2012-2013
• Rutgers Center For Historical Analysis, Faculty Fellow, 2006-2007
• Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, Teaching Fellow, 2006-2007
• Andrew W. Mellon Time-Release Grant Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, Spring 2004

• Executive Committee, Division of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature, Modern Languages Association (elected term 2010-2015)
• Board of Advisors, The Modernist Journals Project (dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp)
• Executive Committee, Division on Anthropological Approaches to Literature, Modern Languages Association (elected term, 2001-2005)
• Member, American Anthropological Association
• Member, American Studies Association
• Member, Modern Languages Association

• "Realism as Modernism," in ed. Keith Newlin, The Oxford Handbook of American Realism (forthcoming).
• "Review Essay: Racial Mediums," American Literary History 28:3 (Fall 2016) 613-623.
• "What Travels? The Movement of Movements; or, Ephemeral Bibelots from Paris to Lansing, with Love," in eds. James J. Connolly, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall, Robert Hall, and Patrick Collier, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) 181-214.
• "Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Networks)," The Henry James Review 36:1 (Winter 2015) 1-23.
• "Indian Movies and the Vernacular of Modernism," in eds. Evans and Glass, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters (Univ. of Washington Press, 2014), 190-211.
• “Ephemeral Bibelots’ in the 1890s,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol 2, North America 1894-1960 (2012).
• “Introduction to Le Petit Journal des Refusées,” The Modernist Journals Project, Online Publication: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.119&view=mjp_object.
• “Introduction: Rethinking the Disciplinary Confluence of Anthropology and Literary Studies”
  Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 49.4, 2007
• “Where Was Boas During the Renaissance in Harlem? Race, Diffusion, and the Culture Paradigm in the History of Anthropology” 
  History of Anthropology Series 11, 2006
• “Howellsian Chic: The Local Color of Cosmopolitanism” 
  ELH: English Literary History 71, 2004
• "Commentary: Catherine Russell's Recovery of the Head-Hunters"  
  Visual Anthropology 11, 1998
• "Cushing's Zuni Sketchbooks: Literature, Anthropology and American Notions of Culture" 
  American Quarterly 49, December 1997

• Companion website to In the Land of the Head Hunters film restoration project: www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu