American Literature and African American Literature
American Literature and African American Literature
Lloyd Pratt currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2025-2028). He is completing a book on Emerson's twentieth-century readers. Focused on four different case studies, the book traces Emerson's thought as it passes through the hands of a member of the Black cultural left, a white woman institutionalised by her husband in the American South, an Anglo-German mining engineer in the Carpathian Mountains, and an accomplished French actor. Each of these figures recasts Emerson in ways that clarify and challenge standing views of his philosophies of self-reliance, nature, and politics. An essay on Black Aesthetic education and self-reliance drawn from the book is forthcoming in Genre.
In addition to the Emerson project, two other essays are forthcoming. One connects Frederick Douglass's account of "plain reading" to contemporary discussions of Constitutional originalism and to "textualist" Black art and interpretation in the 1980s. It will be published in the new Oxford Handbook to Frederick Douglass. The other essay centres on an understudied Black poet from New Orleans, Marcus Christian. It shows how Christian's account of an "ancient art of sociality" founded in Black craft as art links Christian back in time to the Black poetry of 1840s New Orleans and forward in time to the contemporary New Orleans musical ensemble Les Cenelles. It will appear in a special issue of African American Review on literature and the other arts. This essay draws on a collaborative event with Les Cenelles at the Historic New Orleans Collection titled "Three Centuries of Resistance." Pratt has also recently co-edited with Philip Gould a special issue of NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction titled "Fictions of the American Revolution."
Pratt has been a Mellon Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a National Endowment for the Humanities (US) Long-Term Fellow and NEMLA Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities/Bay State Historical League Scholar in Residence at the Nantucket Atheneum, and a Verney Fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. With Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, he also received a National Endowment for the Arts (US) New Forms Regional Grant. He co-directed (with Jeannine DeLombard) the American Antiquarian Society's 2010 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in America, has served on the Modern Language Association's Division Executive Committee on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and was elected to the founding executive committee of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He has served on the editorial board of American Literature and is an associate editor of NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Before joining the Oxford English Faculty, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Michigan State University. He is a member of the Board of Management of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at St John's College. For several years, he was a member of the Bread Loaf Faculty at Oxford; he was the 2015-2016 Pierce Visiting Scholar at Oxford College of Emory University. In addition to essays in various journals and collections, he has published two books: Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century and The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature, both with University of Pennsylvania Press.
