James Smethurst
Professor and Graduate Program Director
Dr. James Smethurst is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Southern Maine, his M.A. in English from the City College of New York, and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. Prior to coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he taught at the University of North Florida.
His primary research areas are African American literature, culture, and intellectual history from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on black cultural and political radicalism. He is currently working on a history of the Black Arts Movement in the southern United States.
PUBLICATIONS
Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020)
SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, with John H. Bracey Jr. and Sonia Sanchez (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)
The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem 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, UNC Press, 2005)
Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 2003)