Guest Lecture Benjamin Fagan (Auburn University)

Benjamin Fagan received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and his B.A. from the University of Iowa. He teaches courses on early African American literature and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, Legacy, American Periodicals, and Comparative American Studies. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society. His first book, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation, examines how the institutional and material forms of black newspapers helped shape ideas of black chosenness in the decades before the Civil War. He is also a member of the Black Press Research Collective, a group of scholars dedicated to making primary and secondary materials related to black newspapers more widely accessible. Towards that end, he is currently collaborating with members of the collective on a born-digital book that explores the place of transnational literature in the early black press.

(See: http://www.cla.auburn.edu/english/people/professorial-faculty/benjamin-fagan/)

University of Graz   
Department of American Studies
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