Marlon Ross

(2001)
Professor
British Romanticism, 20th Century African American Literature, Gender & Queer Theory

Degrees

Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1983
M.A. University of Chicago, 1979
B.A. Southwestern University, 1978

Books

  • Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New York University Press, 2004.
  • "Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation and the Challenge of Eco-Literacy," in The Lessons of Romanticism, ed. Robert F. Gleckner and Thomas Pfau, Duke University Press, 1998. 126-156.
  • The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Essays in Volumes

  • “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm.”  In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology.  Ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson.  Duke University Press, 2005.  161-189.
  • “The New Negro Displayed: Self-Ownership, Proprietary Sites/Sights and the Bonds/Bounds of Race.”  In Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity.  Ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush.  Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002.  259-301.
  • “Race, Rape, Castration: Feminist Theories of Sexual Violence and Masculine Strategies of Black Protest.”  In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theories: New Directions.  Ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.  305-343.
  • “Trespassing the Colorline: Aggressive Mobility and Sexual Transgression in the Construction of New Negro Modernity.”  In Modernism, Inc.: Essays on American Modernity.  Edited by Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston.  New York: New York University Press, 2001.  48-67.
  • “Now Our Hemans.”  Foreword to Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.  Edited by Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk.  New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s.  x-xxvi. 
  • “White Fantasies of Desire: Baldwin and the Racial Identities of Sexuality.”  In James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride.  New York: New York University Press, 1999.  13-55.
  • “Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation and the Challenge of Eco-Literacy.” In The Lessons of Romanticism.  Edited by Robert F. Gleckner and Thomas Pfau.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.  126-156.

Journal Articles

  • “Callaloo, Everyone?” Callaloo Volume 30.1 (Winter 2007). Special Issue: “Reading Callaloo / Eating Callaloo”: The First of Four Special 30th Anniversary Issues. Shona N. Jackson and Karina L. Céspedes, guest eds.  87-94.
  • “An Anatomy of the Straight Black Sissy.” FORECASST (Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies).Special issue on Blackness and Sexualities.  Michelle M. Wright and Antje Schuhmann, eds. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007
  • “Cross-Gendering the Racial Memory: The Gigantic Feminine as Double-Crossing American (Black) Nationalist History.” Transatlantica: révues d’études américaines, 2006:1, Beyond the New Deal, [En ligne]. Mis en ligne le 2 mai 2006, référence du 21 mars 2007. URL : http://transatlantica.revues.org/document1007.html.
  • “Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging.”  New Literary History.  Special issue on “Is There Life after Identity Politics.” 31.4 (Autumn 2000): 827-850.
  • “Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective.”  In Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies.  Ed. Dwight McBride and Jennifer Devere Brody.  Special issue of Callaloo 23.1 (Winter 2000): 290-312.
  • “Scandalous Reading: The Political Uses of Scandal In and Around Regency Britain.”  The Wordsworth Circle 27 (1996): 103-112.

Reprints

  • “Contented Spinsters: Governessing and the Limits of Discursive Desire in the Fiction of I. Compton-Burnett.”  Twentieth Century Literature Criticism. Volume 180.  Ed. Tom Schoenberg.  Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson-Gale, 2006.
  • “Naturalizing Gender: Women’s Place in Wordsworth’s Ideological Landscape.”  Rpt. in Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Critical Studies.  Ed. Michael O’Neill and Mark Sandy.  London: Routledge, 2005. 94-110.
  • “Some Glances at the Black Fag: Race, Same-Sex Desire, and Cultural Belonging.” Reprinted in The Black Studies Reader. Edited by Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel.  New York: Routledge, 2004. 153-173.
  • “Some Glances at the Black Fag: Race, Same-Sex Desire, and Cultural Belonging.”  Reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader.  Ed. Winston Napier.  New York: New York University Press, 2000.
  • “Authority and Authenticity.”  Reprinted in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature.  Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi.  Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.  231-257.

Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries

  • “Queering the African American Essay.”  Review essay of Robert Reid-Pharr’s Black Gay Man and Phillip Brian Harper’s Private Affairs.  GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005): 301-307.
  • Review of Tim Fulford. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, DeQuincey and Hazlitt.  New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1999. Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (Summer 2003): 281-86.
  • Review of Race Men by Hazel Carby.  Modernism/Modernity. 7.2 (April 2000): 313-315.
  • “In Search of Black Men’s Masculinities.” Review Essay on Don Belton’s Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream; Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity; Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham’s Representing Black Men.  Feminist Studies 24.3(Fall 1998): 599-626.

Selected Papers

  • “Hysteria and the Racial Economy of Domestic Labor in Wright’s Native Son,” Richard Wright at 100, Woodson Institute symposium, Charlottesville, VA, 11 Arpil 2008.
  • “What Race Theory and Queer Theory Should Teach Us about the Future of Literary Studies,” State of the Profession Colloquium, Department of English, The University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 8 November 2007.
  • Callaloo Thirtieth Anniversary Conference, Closing Keynote Panel: The Future Direction of Black Literary Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 27 October 2007.
  • “Cross-Gendering the Racial Memory: The Gigantic Feminine as Double-Crossing American (Black) Nationalist History,” Ernest Gaines symposium, Colloque International, Ecole doctorale de Paris 7, Institut d’Etudes anglophones Charles V, 20 Paris, France, 20 January 2006.
  • Chair and respondent, “Outside/Inside/Beyond Jim Crow: The Strange Choreographies of Racial Segregation,” American Studies Association annual conference, Washington, D.C., 4 November 2005.
  • “The Race of/in Romanticism: Notes Toward a Critical Race Theory,” opening keynote for “Black Romanticism” symposium.  Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 23 September 2005.
  • “Razing the Dead: Internment and the American Politics of Space at Jefferson’s Monticello,” with K. Ian Grandison, British Association of American Studies 50th Anniversary Conference, Robinson College, Cambridge, 17 April 2005.
  • “An Anatomy of the Straight Black Sissy as Theoretical Intervention,” Collegium for African-American Research, Universite François-Rabelais, Tours, France, 23 April 2005;special session “Reframing Black Masculinity in Theoretical Perspective,” MLA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 29 December 2004; University of Virginia Department of Anthropology Speaker Series, 28 January 2005.
  • “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” University of Virginia English Department faculty series, 2 April 2004.
  • Invited Speaker, Gender Talk panel: response to Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, authors of Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities.  New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.  Princeton University, 17 November 2003.
  • Respondent, “Willard Motley Reconsidered.” American Studies Association annual conference. Hartford, CT, 16 October 2003.
  • “Callaloo, Everyone?”  Paper delivered at special session: “Callaloo and 25 Years of Writing in the African Diaspora.”  Modern Language Association Annual Convention.  New Orleans, LA, 29 December 2001.
  • “Men in Feminism Revisited: A Roundtable Discussion.”  Program arranged by the Society for Critical Exchange.  Modern Language Association Annual Convention.  New Orleans, 27 December 2001.
  • “‘A Negro is raping me’: Thoughts on Race, Rape, and Castration.”  Davis Humanities Institute Distinguished Lecture Series.  University of California, Davis, 17 May 2001.
  • “The Black Man Problem: Manly Tactics of Racial Trespassing in Jim Crow America.”  Claud Howard Visiting Scholar Lecture, Southwestern University.  Georgetown, Texas, 29 March 2001.
  • “Doing Great Violence: The Power Politics of Dueling in Genteel Regency Britain.” Dartmouth University Department of English lecture series.  Hanover, New Hampshire, 27 February 2001.
  • “Black Manhood and Racial Trespassing in Early 20th Century America.”  Symposium on African American Manhood: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.  University of Detroit.  Detroit, Michigan, 17 October 2000.
  • “Civilization and Its Dislocations: Racial Scattering, Sexual Decency, and the Missionary Impulse.”  Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S.- Europe Conference.  Université d’Orléans, Orléans, France, 22-25 June 2000.
  • “A Negro is raping me”: Further Thoughts on Race, Rape, Castration.”  Yale University African American Studies Program Works in Progress Seminar. 19 April 2000.
  • “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm.” Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference.  Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 7-9 April 2000.
  • “Disarming the Black Champ: Post-Industrialism, Postmodernism, and the Post-Civil Rights Legacy of Joe Louis.”  University of Massachusetts, 28 March 2000.
  • “The New Negro Displayed: Self-Ownership, Proprietary Sites/Sights, and the Bonds/Bounds of Race.” Cultural Property Conference.  St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Oxford, England, 21 April 1998.

Honors

  • John H. D'Arms Faculty Award fo Distinguished Graduate Mentoring int he Humanities, University of Michigan, 1999
  • Michigan Humanities Fellowship, University of Michigan, 1998
  • Excellence in Education Award, College of Literature, Science & the Arts, The University of Michigan, 1997
  • Excellence in Research Award, College of Literature, Science & the Arts, The University of Michigan, 1995
  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1992-1993
  • Office of the Vice President for Research Grant, University of Michigan, 1992-1993
  • Rackham Faculty Recognition Award, The University of Michigan, 1992-1993
  • Lilly Endowment Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship, 1987-1988