Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and

comparative literature Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

Early life

Edwards attended

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia.

Career

Teaching

Edwards has taught at Rutgers University and now at Columbia, as well as

Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

's summer graduate program, the

School of Criticism and Theory The School of Criticism and Theory, now at Cornell University, is a summer program (offered in six-week seminars) in social science and literature. It is one of the most influential such programs in the United States to propagate the new dominant s ...

, and the Dartmouth summer graduate program The Futures of American Studies.

Scholarship

Edwards's first book is '' The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism'' (

Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...

, 2003). It examines black writers in the

interwar period In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The interwar period was relative ...

, focusing on sites of interaction between

Anglophone Speakers of English are also known as Anglophones, and the countries where English is natively spoken by the majority of the population are termed the ''Anglosphere''. Over two billion people speak English , making English the largest language ...

and

Francophone French became an international language in the Middle Ages, when the power of the Kingdom of France made it the second international language, alongside Latin. This status continued to grow into the 18th century, by which time French was the l ...

black writers to develop an argument about the generative potential of translation, specifically in the black diaspora. Among other influences, Edwards draws on Stuart Hall's use of the concept of articulation to develop a theoretical use of the French term décalage, "referring to a shift in space or time or the gap that results from it... dwards arguesthat these disparate locations are, like joints, sites of potential forward motion." Edwards also edited the collection ''Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies'' (

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by Jennifer Crewe (2014–present) and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fie ...

, 2004) with

Farah Jasmine Griffin Farah Jasmine Griffin (born 1963) is an American academic and professor specializing in African-American literature. She is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, chair of the African Am ...

and Robert G. O'Meally. In 2009, Edwards edited a new printing of

W.E.B. DuBois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up i ...

's ''

The Souls of Black Folk ''The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches'' is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature. The book contains several essays on r ...

'' from

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

. Edwards serves on the editorial boards of

Callaloo Callaloo (many spelling variants, such as kallaloo, calaloo, calalloo, calaloux or callalloo; ) is a popular Caribbean vegetable dish. There are many variants across the Caribbean, depending on the availability of local vegetables. The main in ...

and Transition.

Claude McKay manuscript discovery

In 2009, Edwards's graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier discovered a manuscript in Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the papers of writer

Samuel Roth Samuel Roth (1893–1974) was an American publisher and writer. Described as an "all-around schemer", he was the plaintiff in ''Roth v. United States'' (1957). The case was a Supreme Court ruling on freedom of sexual expression and whose minor ...

. In 2012, Edwards and Cloutier, in consultation with other experts and after examining archival materials and personal correspondence, authenticated the manuscript as a previously unknown 1941 work by

Claude McKay Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ (September 15, 1890See Wayne F. Cooper, ''Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner In The Harlem Renaissance (New York, Schocken, 1987) p. 377 n. 19. As Cooper's authoritative biography explains, McKay's family predated ...

, called ''Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem''.

Henry Louis Gates Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Am ...

, who served as one of the experts evaluating the manuscript's authenticity, called it a "major discovery...It dramatically expands the canon of novels written by

Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the t ...

writers."

Awards

In 2004, Edwards's book ''The Practice of Diaspora'' won the John Hope Franklin Prize from the

American Studies Association The American Studies Association (ASA) is a scholarly organization founded in 1951. It is the oldest scholarly organization devoted to the interdisciplinary study of U.S. culture and history. The ASA works to promote meaningful dialogue about t ...

and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the

Society for French Historical Studies The Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS) is, along with the Western Society for French History (WSFH), one of the two primary historical societies devoted to the study of French history headquartered in the United States. The SFHS edits th ...

, and an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the

Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

. In 2005, Edwards won the

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress ...

's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship, to spend one year researching a project on

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

in New York in the 1970s. In 2015, Edwards was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

to pursue a book project entitled "The Art of the Lecture."

External links

Brent Hayes Edwards
at Columbia University

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Edwards, Brent Hayes Living people American literary critics Columbia University faculty Yale University alumni Columbia University alumni Black studies scholars American literary theorists Place of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people)