Houston Baker, a specialist in American and African-American literature and culture, will speak on “Turning South Again – Rethinking Black Modernism” on Thursday, Nov. 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
A faculty member at Duke University, Baker is a former president of the Modern Language Association.
He has taught English and American literatures at Yale University, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. A winner of several fellowships and teaching awards, he was one of 25 United States scholars and artists chosen as a Distinguished Fulbright Foundation Fellow in celebration of that foundation's 50th anniversary in 1996.
He has written and edited some twenty books and more than 80 essays, articles, and book chapters. His most recent books include Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (1993) and Black British Cultural Studies (1997), which he co-edited with Ruth Lindeborg and Manthia Diawara. He is a published poet whose most recent volume is Blues Journeys Home (1985).