SEA Featured Scholar, September 2024: Joseph Rezek
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I fell in love with Emerson and Thoreau my junior year in high school. I was coming out of the closet as gay at that time and they helped me, somehow. “Trust thyself!” Emerson said, and I thought… okay! I went on to study early American literature and history in college, from a transatlantic perspective. I was planning on becoming a high school teacher, but by the end of college I had decided to try and become a professor.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
My favorite early American writer is definitely Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley is brilliant and endlessly fascinating, a real key to early American history and literature. I teach her in almost all of my classes: intro-level English classes, upper-level senior seminars on the Age of Revolution, and graduate seminars in book history. I love teaching and writing about her because every time I return to her poems or letters I am surprised anew. I don’t think we will ever understand her fully, which is probably why she is the central figure in the book I’m currently finishing. She will be part of my next book, too.
What are you currently working on?
This year I hope to finish my second monograph, The Racialization of Print. The book traces the historical emergence of the belief that a single book, by virtue of its author’s racial identity, can reveal profound truths about an entire race of people. This belief animated Thomas Jefferson when he picked up Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects and decided that book confirmed his racist ideas about African-descended people (he writes about this in Notes on the State of Virginia). What cultural conditions were necessary for such an idea to make sense, and what were its consequences in American literary and cultural history? I begin in the early modern period, with the spread of printing in Europe and the rise of modern racial categories, and end in the mid-nineteenth century, when many Black and Native American authors strategically embraced the racialization of print as they published books to forward the cause of racial justice. I write about authors like John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Joseph Addison, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
This summer I read Percival Everett’s novel James, his re-writing of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim. I re-read Huck Finn first to maximize the experience of James, and the whole thing was just incredible. Everett’s novel is a stunning rebuke and homage to Twain’s. It’s a thriller in itself: the farther you get into James, the more uncertain you are about what he will do with Huck Finn. I loved reading it and I hope to teach it someday.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
I am inspired more and more by people who are amazing scholars while also being upstanding, generous, trustworthy academic citizens. People who mentor others, who serve as editors or in administrative roles, who keep scholarly organizations going, who try to improve labor conditions for graduate students and NTT scholars, who make their fields more equitable. These are the folks who give me hope in academia.
Joseph Rezek is Associate Professor of English at Boston University.