Mark A. Sanders (B.A. Oberlin College, 1985; Ph.D. Brown University, 1992) specializes in early twentieth-century American and African American literature, more specifically the connections between “mainstream” American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. His research interests also include African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Cuban and Afro-Latino literature and culture. He is currently writing a translation of Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, the only self-authored autobiography by an Afro-Cuban soldier in Cuba’s final war of independence. Professor Sanders teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, and contemporary African American literature and culture, often exploring issues of racial and cultural identity, citizenship, and freedom. He also teaches courses on Afro-Cuban literature and culture, moving from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Selected Publications:

Books:

• The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell, A Black Mambí in Cuba (translator), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2009.
  

• Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell) New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  

• Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
  

Articles:

• “Afterward: The Black Flame Then and Now,” in The Black Flame: A Trilogy, Book One, The Ordeal of Mansart (also published in Book Two and Book Three) by W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 231-245.

• “African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 96-111.