English Expert - Michele Elam

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Michele Elam
Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English

Biography

Michele Elam's courses and research interests span the 18th-21st centuries, from Olaudah Equiano to Aaron McGruder, and from race and narrative to black cultural performance. She is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a book on post-race and post-apartheid representation in the U.S. and South Africa with her husband, Professor Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Professor Elam has published articles in African American Review, American Literature, Theatre Journal, and Genre, among others. Her work also appears in collections on race and culture such as Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race and Gender from ""Oroonoko"" to Anita Hill (eds. Cathy Davidson and Michael Moon, Duke University Press) and in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Gender of the Color-Line (U of Minnesota P., eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Weinbaum).

Chair of the Executive Committee for the Black Literatures & Culture Division of the Modern Language Association, at Stanford Elam has served as Director of the Program in African & African American Studies (2007-10), Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English (2006-08), and is currently Director of Curriculum in English. Elam is twice the recipient of the St. Clair Drake Outstanding Teaching Award at Stanford (2004, 2006) among her other teaching awards.

Recent undergraduate and graduate seminars include African American Poetics, Narratives of Enslavement & Theories of Redress, Race Theory in the Post-Race Era, Mixed Race Literature & Theory, Black to the Future: the End(s) of African American Literary History, W.E.B. Du Bois & American Culture, Toni Morrison & the Occasion of Black Feminism.

 

Key Works

  • The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics & Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford University Press, March, 2011)
  • “The 'Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome': Mixed-Race, Identity, and Popular Culture,” Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, Eds. Hazel Rose Markus and Paula M. L. Moya. New York: Norton, 2010.
  • “Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, & Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” African American Review, forthcoming Spring 2009.
  • “Blood Debt: Nation and Reparation in Langston Hughes’ Play, Mulatto.” With Harry J. Elam, Jr. Theatre Journal, forthcoming spring 2009.
  • “The Mis-Education of Mixed Race.” Identities in Education. Eds. Amie MacDonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal.  New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009, 131-150.
  • "Mixed Race and Cultural Memory: Carl Hancock Rux’s Talk," Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter, eds. Signatures of the Past. Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama. (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008): 83-100.
  •  “Dunbar’s Children,” African American Review Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Special Issue (Volume 41.2, Summer 2007): 259-268. Recipient of the Darwin T. Turner and Joel Weixlman Award for Best Essay of 2007 in African American Review, given by the Black Literature and Culture Division of the Modern Language Association
  • "Passing in the Post-Race Moment:  Danzy Senna, Philip Roth & Colson Whitehead," Post-Soul Special Issue, African American Review (Volume 41.4 Fall 2007.)
  • Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930.  Cambridge University Press, 2003.

 

Prof. Elam in the News

 

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