Interests and Information
W.E.B. Du Bois
Ralph Ellison
African American literature and intellectual history
Francophone Caribbean literature
Literary Theory and Criticism
Metaphor
Cultural studies
American studies
Black nationalism
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Washington University, 2001.
M.A., Comparative Literature, Washington University, 1996
M.Ed., Higher Education Administration, Ohio University, 1994
A.B., French, Ohio University, 1987
rrfisher@email.unc.edu
Much of my work has been in the area of African American literature and literary theory. My most recent work includes “Remnants of Memory: Testimony and Being in Sketches of Southern Life,” which will appear in a special poetry number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance in 2008 (vol 54 no 1); “The Anatomy of a Symbol: Reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess: A Romance” (CR: The New Centennial Review, vol 6 no 3, 2007); “Cultural Artifacts and the Narrative of History: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Exhibiting of Culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle” (Modern Fiction Studies, vol 51 no 4, 2005); and “Metaphoric Black Bodies in the Hinterlands of Race, or, towards Deciphering the Du Boisian Concept of Race and Nation in ‘The Conservation of Races’” (Race and Ethnicity: Across Time and Space, 2004). My introduction and notes for a new edition of The Interesting Narrative, by the eighteenth-century autobiographer Olaudah Equiano, was published by Barnes and Noble Press in December 2005. Another essay I am currently completing, entitled “Habitations of the Veil: Two Instances of Autobiography,” is forthcoming in the journal Criticism. This piece focuses on questions of refiguration, presence, and representation in two autobiographical texts by W.E.B. Du Bois. I also have written encyclopedia and/or review articles on Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Gerald Early, and Itabari Njeri.
As a comparatist, I am interested in transnational, African American, and American studies, and have conducted various sorts of graduate and undergraduate seminars having to do with matters of cross-cultural representation. My research areas also include the Francophone Caribbean literatures of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Currently, I am working on two book projects. The first is a study titled Words without Masters: The Poetics of Metaphor in African American Literature. The second is a collection of critical essays on the work of Paul Gilroy. This volume, which I am co-editing with Jay Garcia, will include two new essays by Professor Gilroy. It is under consideration at UNC Press. A future book project will focus on World’s Fairs, African Americans, and the Politics of Engagement.