Gene Jarrett

Gene Jarrett will become the third Connelly Lecturer in Fall 2009.

Currently Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of African American Studies at Boston University, Gene Andrew Jarrett earned his A.B. in English from Princeton University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University. He has written and edited several books on the relationship between racial politics and cultural representation. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and the editor of African American Literature beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (New York University Press, 2006) and Claude McKay's 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home (The Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas Series of Rutgers University Press, 2007). He is also the co-editor of several books: they include, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton University Press, 2007); with Thomas Lewis Morgan, The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Du nbar (Ohio University Press, 2005; paperback 2009); and with Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau, The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio University Press, 2009). He has published essays and book reviews in PMLA, American Literary History, African American Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, NOVEL, American Literary Realism, The Blackwell Concise Companion to American Fiction, and The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, among other academic journals and scholarly books.

Jarrett has just finished writing a book, tentatively entitled Representing the Race: The Politics of African American Literature from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. The book explores the following questions: What is the political value of African American literature? How does one measure the historical role this literature has played in helping African Americans secure or improve their representation in the realms of government, public policy, and law? How does one measure the historical contribution of this literature's own representations or portrayals of "race" to strategies of African American self-empowerment? Representing the Race lays out the texts and contexts of African American literature-or, more generally, African American intellectual culture-to address these questions. The book aims to overcome the methodological and historiographical challenges of uniting the fields of literary studies and political studies, on the one hand, while describing the political value of African American literature across two centuries, on the other. Throughout, Jarrett argues that the abilities of African American literature to transform society on multiple political levels have not been treated as carefully and critically as the topic deserves.

Jarrett's Connelly Lectures are excerpts from the first and final chapters of Representing the Race. For details of the talks, see the Connelly Lectures main page.