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Jarvis C McInnis

Cordelia and William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English
English
Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708
313 Allen Building, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City of New York.  Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture.

He is currently at work on his first book project, tentatively titled, “The Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by exploring the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Jarvis’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as CallalooMELUSMississippi QuarterlyPublic Books, and The Global South.

Professor McInnis hopes to curate a classroom space where his students feel free to take intellectual risks, and where they can use African diaspora literature and culture to celebrate and affirm black humanity and creativity; interrogate and dismantle systems of power, injustice, and inequality; and imagine new futures and more just worlds. 

Office Hours


 Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:00(313 Allen)

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Cordelia and William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English · 2019 - Present English, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Assistant Professor of English · 2017 - Present English, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published April 16, 2025
How Faculty Can Build Mentoring Networks
Published May 9, 2019
Junior Faculty, Students, Launch 'Black Think Tank'
Published November 7, 2017
Three New English Department Faculty Take Study of Literature Beyond the Novel

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Recent Publications


a "reorder of things" in black studies: sacred praxis, phono(geo)graphy, and the counter-archive of diaspora

Journal Article Comparative Literature Studies · February 1, 2022 This article examines Erna Brodber's 1994 novel, Louisiana, as a methodological invitation to the field of Black Studies to query how we do the work of black study. A Jamaican social scientist turned novelist, Brodber finds the tools of social science and ... Full text Open Access Cite

Black Women's Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation

Journal Article American Literary History · December 1, 2019 Full text Open Access Cite

A corporate plantation reading public: Labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black South

Journal Article American Literature · September 1, 2019 Featured Publication This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Missis ... Full text Open Access Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Columbia University · 2015 Ph.D.
Columbia University · 2012 M.Phil.
Tougaloo College · 2009 B.A.