James E. Smethurst, Associate Professor
310 New Africa House
545-0185
Office Hours: TuTh 2:30-3:30 p.m. and by appointment.
Spring 2012 Courses
AfroAm 692A "Literary Theory"
AfroAm 391E "Afro-American Literature of the 19040s"
AfroAm 702 "Major Works in Afro-American Studies II"
Brief Bio
James Smethurst received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in 1996. He is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Professor Smethurst is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press , 2005). He is also the co-editor of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His scholarly interests include African American literature and culture; 20th-century poetry in English; 19th- and 20th-century American literature; Chicana/o literature; ethnic studies; literary modernism; film, music and popular culture; literature of industrialization and urbanization; cultural history; intellectual history; and gender studies. He is currently working on a study of African American literature culture from 1880 to 1918 and ideas of artistic modernity and modernism in the United States.
Publications
The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance Renaissance
(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction,
with Chris Green and Rachel Rubin, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
(Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Left of the Colore Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States
(Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003)
The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1999)