Research Interests for Maurice O Wallace

A 1995 Duke PhD, Maurice Wallace has also taught at in the departments of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University. He is a former member of the Yale Journal of Criticism editorial collective. Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, his recent teachings and writings have turned to literature and visual culture, with particular emphases on autobiography, realism, and the visual technologies of race and gender. Presently, he is at work on two monographs: the first is a critical meditation on race, vocation, and exile in the life of James Baldwin; the second is a study on photography, masculinity and the African American Civil War soldier. He also co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of the forthcoming collection Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. His essays have appeared in American Literary History and Journal of African American History and several critical anthologies.

Recent Publications

1. with Shawn Michelle Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (2012)
2. Violence and Manhood in Douglass’s Civil War, in The Cembridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice Lee (2009), Cambridge University Press (In press..) [author's comments]
3. Print, Prosthesis, Impersonation: Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Limits of American Literary History, American Literary History, vol. 20 no. 4 (Winter, 2008), pp. 794-806
4. Riveted to the Wall: Covetous Fathers, Devoted Sons and the Patriarchal Pieties of Herman Melville and Frederick Dougass, in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (2008), pp. 300-326, University of North Carolina Press
5. Riveted to the Wall: Covetous Fathers, Devoted Sons, and the Patriarchal Pieties of Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass, edited by Robert Levine and Samuel Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (forthcoming), University of North Carolina Press