Ivy Wilson
Assistant Professor
Specialty
Nineteenth-century U.S. literature, African American literature and culture, literatures of the black diaspora
Degrees
B.A., Stanford University; Ph.D., Yale University
Profile
Ivy Wilson teaches courses in the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His recent essays on nineteenth-century U.S. literature have appeared in such journals as ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA. His forthcoming book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford University Press), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship. By examining such figures as David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Harper, he argues that African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. He is also editing volumes on James M. Whitfield and Albery A. Whitman, two nineteenth-century African American poets. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relation to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national. He is a guest editor of a special issue of Callaloo on the cultures and letters of the black diaspora.
Recent Publications (since 2006 or forthcoming):
Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Other Writings by Albery A. Whitman. Ed. Ivy G. Wilson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, forthcoming).
"Whitman Unbound: Organic Compacts and the Limits of Transculturation." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54 (forthcoming, August 2008).
"''No soul above': Labor and The 'law in art' in 'The Bell-Tower.'" Arizona Quarterly 63.1 (Spring 2007): 27-47.
"Stomping the Blues: Kevin Young and the New Idiom of American Poetry." Notre Dame Review 23 (Winter 2007): 301-06.
"On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave.'" PMLA 121 (2006): 453-68.
Recent honors and awards (since 2003):
Career Enhancement Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2006-2007
Paul M. and Barbara Henkels Grant, 2005
Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts Award, Summer 2005
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2003-2004
National Humanities Center, Summer Institute in Literary Studies, Summer 2003
Contact Information
218 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-4125
wilson.166@nd.edu