Faculty Profiles
- Maurice Wallace
- Professor of English
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- Primary Areas of Specialization: African American literature and culture; Nineteenth-century American literature; Black Cultural Theory, Sound Studies, Visual Culture, Frederick Douglass Studies, James Baldwin Studies, Critical (Martin Luther) King Studies
- Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Environmental Humanities
- About:
Maurice Wallace Professor of English at Rutgers University, New-Brunswick. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned him an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press. He is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity and has written a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, published by Marshal-Cavendish Publishers. He has written a number of scholarly articles ranging topically from the nineteenth-century religious roots of African American literature to early and modern photography, race and disability, and Black oratory. He is the recent recipient of the Rutgers Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award.
Maurice is presently at work on a monograph he calls Black Trees, a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US.
- Book(s):
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
Major American Writers: Toni Morrison
Photography and Literature
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Power, Love, Justice
- Graduate Courses Taught:
‘Black Is… Black Ain’t…’: Currents in African American Literary and Cultural Theory
Slavery and the Problem of Aesthetics
- Awards:
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
- Other Publications:
“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.
- Education: 1995 Ph.D., English Literature Duke University 1989 A.B., English Literature and African & African American Studies Cum laude. Washington University in St. Louis
