Sterling L. Bland

Sterling L. Bland is an associate professor of English. Until beginning a yearlong research sabbatical during the 2006-2007 academic year, Professor Bland served as associate dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He received his doctorate from New York University. His areas of research and teaching include nineteenth-century American literature; African American literature and culture; autobiography; narrative theory; theory of the novel; and jazz studies.

He has published widely in the area of African American literature and culture. His most recent research is contained in an essay entitled “Fire and Romance: African American Literature since World War II,” which appears in A Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Hendin (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Professor Bland’s previous book publications include Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation (Greenwood, 2000), which explores the ways slave narrators, in the confluence of cultural and political contexts, rhetorically sought to create and authorize themselves and define their experiences. He also collected and annotated a three-volume anthology of out-of-print slave narratives entitled African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology (Greenwood, 2001).

Professor Bland is currently working on a book-length project entitled Rewriting the Race: A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century African American Literature. This project is a literary cultural history that examines the trajectory of African American literature through the twentieth century.

Professor Bland is a member of numerous literary organizations, including the Modern Language Association and The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and serves on a number of professional boards.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
AMERICAN LITERAUTRE OF THE 19TH CENTURY