Executive Committee

I am a historian of the nineteenth-century Americas and Atlantic and Pacific worlds, focusing on race, slavery, and emancipation. I earned my Ph.D. in Latin American History from Columbia University, where I was a Ford Foundation Fellow, and my B.A. in Philosophy and History from Brown University, where I was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and Beinecke Scholar.

I am an historian of maritime environments, food, and island geographies in the late medieval and early modern Atlantic world. My main research has been on the sixteenth-century fisheries at Newfoundland, but I am more broadly interested in the earliest years of European expansion into the Atlantic basin during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I received my PhD from the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. In addition, I hold an M.A. in history from McGill...

I am a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In both my creative and scholarly work, I explore the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. My current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positivity, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. My research/creative work has been supported by the Mellon...

Kristin Grogan is an Assistant Professor in English at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, labor history and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is finishing her first book, an account of the dynamic relationship between poetry and labor of various kinds—artisanal, mechanical, clerical, and reproductive work—with chapters on Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. She is beginning a new project on...

David Kurnick is a Professor of English at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus on the history of the novel, narrative theory, sociology and literature, and sexuality and gender. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). The book examines the theatrical ambitions of major novelists (William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin) better known for their narrative explorations of domestic and psychological...

I am a literary comparatist focusing on issues of translation, genre, feminist and postcolonial theory, and world literature. My specialization is in twentieth-century Hindi and Tamil literature and literary history with an emphasis on how these rich traditions converse with other literatures of India and the world. I approach the study of literature through close textual reading combined with a firm rootedness in how understandings of the relationship between literature and society have...

Carter Mathes is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is a specialist in African American literature, twentieth-century Literature, and African diaspora studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (2015) focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also co-edited (with Mae G. Henderson) a volume on Black Arts Movement writer and critic Larry Neal, “Don’t...

Professor Novacich specializes in medieval literature. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, drama and performance cultures, gender studies, archival theory, visual culture, fiction, and travel literature. She has essays on these subjects in an array of journals, including Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, postmedieval, and Philological Quarterly. Her first book, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge UP) examines how...

Caitlin Petre studies the social processes behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary world. Using qualitative research methods such as ethnographic observation and in-depth interviewing, she maps the complex relationships between digital analytics, the social actors who create them, and the established experts who make use of them.

Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (published September 2021 from Princeton University Press), is a...

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is a music theorist and historian specializing in the analysis of American ultra-modernist musical works, the transpacific history of American music, and contemporary composers of East Asian heritage. Previously, she taught at Oberlin College and has held visiting professorships at the Curtis Institute of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, and Bard...

Xiaojue Wang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Comparative Literature. Her research interests include Chinese literature and culture from the late imperial to contemporary periods, cultural Cold War studies in global Asias, Chinese-German intellectual connections, the Sinophone South, film and media studies, sound studies, sonic environmentalism, gender and sexuality, and comparative literature.

She is the author of Modernity...

Laura Weigertis Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. She specializes in Northern European art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Professor Weigert has taught at the University of Nantes and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and was Associate Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College before joining the Rutgers faculty in September, 2006. Her scholarship addresses the...