Jarvis C McInnis, Associate Professor of English

Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City of New York.  Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture.

He is currently at work on his first book project, tentatively titled, “The Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by exploring the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Jarvis’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, and The Global South.

Professor McInnis hopes to curate a classroom space where his students feel free to take intellectual risks, and where they can use African diaspora literature and culture to celebrate and affirm black humanity and creativity; interrogate and dismantle systems of power, injustice, and inequality; and imagine new futures and more just worlds. 

Contact Info:

Office Location:	313 Allen Building, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:

Office Hours:

Spring '25 Semester:

 

 Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:00(313 Allen)

Education:

Ph.D.	Columbia University	2015
M.Phil.	Columbia University	2012
B.A.	Tougaloo College	2009

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. McInnis, JC, Afterlives of the Plantation Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (May, 2025), ISBN 9780231215749  [abs]
2. McInnis, JC, Afterlives of the Plantation Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (May, 2025), pp. 335 pages, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231560955  [abs]
3. McInnis, JC, a "reorder of things" in black studies: sacred praxis, phono(geo)graphy, and the counter-archive of diaspora, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 59 no. 1 (February, 2022), pp. 11-48 [doi]  [abs]
4. Mcinnis, JC, Black Women's Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation, American Literary History, vol. 31 no. 4 (December, 2019), pp. 741-774, Oxford University Press (OUP) [doi]  [abs]
5. McInnis, JC, A corporate plantation reading public: Labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black South, American Literature, vol. 91 no. 3 (September, 2019), pp. 523-555, Duke University Press [doi]  [abs]