phillip richards

I taught courses in Early American Literature, African American Literature, and the Nineteenth-Century American Novel. I supervised master's theses on such topics as the fiction of Nathanael Hawthorne and the history of the American Black Muslims. And I served informally as a native speaker of American English and expert on American literature in interactions with faculty and students. I have published an account of my experience at Grenoble on-line in Dissent in the article "What Good is Knowledge, if You Can't Solve Problems?"

I taught courses in American Literature, African American Literature, and a seminar in Black and White American Writing in the Era of the American War for Independence. I supervised a number of master's theses, and participated in the oral defenses of them. I worked informally with students in the English major at the United States Information Agency library and the American Consulate, and I informally distributed and discussed American literary works with Gabonese and French national students at the undergraduate and graduate level. I gave a scholarly paper at the yearly conference of the American Studies Conference at Cheikh Antah DIop University in Dakar Senegal in the Spring Semester of 1992. In Libreville I taught literature courses simultaneously at the Ecole Normale Superieure while also teaching at Omar Bongo.

I have taught courses in American and African American literature. I have been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Center on Race and Social Division (at Boston University). I have also been a visiting professor in the departments of English at the University of Grenoble (France), Omar Bongo University (Gabon, French Central Africa), and the University of Freiburg (Germany). I have held foundations from the Ford Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I held the Arnold SIo Chair in Diversity and Cmmunity a two-year endowed chair from 2012 to 2014. And I have co-authored Best Literature By and About Blacks and authored two books, Black Heart: the Moral Life in Recent African American Letters and An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland. I have published extensively in academic journals such as American Quarterly, Style, Early American Literature and in literary journals such as The American Scholar, The Massachusetts Review, Cleveland Magazine and Harper's Magazine.

I graduated cum laude with Honors in English. Activities and Societies: The New Journal

I majored in English Literature, completed the Intensive Major in English Literature, and wrote a senior Honors paper on "The Pastoral in the Novels of Herman Melville" Activities and Societies: The New Journal

I specialized in American Literature from the Colonial through the Antebellum periods."]