African American Literature and Photography’s Material Legacies

Cole Morgan
English
UC Irvine

This grant supports archival research critical to the development of my current book project, tentatively titled “The World Before Us: Blackness, Narration, and Photography.” “The World Before Us” breaks new ground in the field of African American literary studies by bringing fundamental questions about the nature of interpretation to bear on the intersection of narrative theory, photographic representation, and selfhood. Methodologically, my project joins traditional literary analysis and contemporary Black Studies together with analytical approaches common to media archeology and the history of photography.