Contact Information:
460 Bartlett Hall
UMass
Amherst, MA 0l003
p: 413-545-3694
f: 413-545-3880
skerrett@english.umass.edu
Last Modified: Apr. 2005 |
Professor
Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught American literature since 1973. He is a graduate of St. Francis College in Brooklyn (1964), and holds an M.A. in Writing from The
Johns Hopkins University (1965), and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Yale University (1975).
From 1978 to 1980 he was an Assistant to the Chancellor of Schools in New York City, and in 1992-1993 he was the Jessie Ball DuPont Visiting Professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He has published work on Stephen Crane and James Purdy, but his research and writing has most often been concerned with African American writers, including essays on Ralph Ellison, James Weldon Johnson, Paule Marshall, and Richard Wright, in American Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, Studies in Short Fiction and elsewhere. An essay on James Weldon Johnson appeared in 1991 in African American Writers, edited by A. Walton Litz and Valerie Smith. Essays on Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison have been published or reprinted in volumes edited by Harold Bloom, Kimberly Benston, Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, and Arnold Rampersad. From 1987 to 1999 he was the Editor of MELUS, the Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He co-edited, with Amritjit Singh and Robert E. Hogan, Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures (1994) and Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to Ethnic American Literatures (1996). In 2001 Longman published his text-anthology. Literature, Race, and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities. Professor Skerrett's courses deal with American Studies and American fiction from 1865 to 1980. In recent years he has taught such graduate courses as Methods for the Study of American Culture and seminars in African American High Culture, History and Memory in Contemporary American Literature, and Wright/Ellison/Baldwin.
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