Pratt, Dr Lloyd

Job Title: University Lecturer in American Literature
College: Linacre College
Period/ Subject: American literature and African American Literature

Email address: lloyd.pratt@ell.ox.ac.uk

Direct Line: +44 (0) 1865 271929
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 271054

Research Interests:

My current book project examines how antebellum African American writers in New Orleans and New England responded to the expanding racial segregation of the United States and the inhospitality to “colored” strangers that it represented. I consider how these writers worked to combat the growing regulation of people of African descent by first occupying and then refiguring the persona of the stranger, while also asking their readers to occupy that same position in turn. These writers exploited the advent of industrial print culture to construct a virtual realm—a public—more conducive to imagined encounters among strangers. I consider the intertwined histories of literary form, media, and politics in African American writing. My readings of nineteenth-century stranger discourse—juvenile literature that emphasizes kindness to strangers, the city guides that were known as “stranger guides,” and the “strangers book” that libraries required visitors to sign—proceed in tandem with analyses of Martin Delany’s North Star letters to Frederick Douglass, Douglass’s Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, and the writing of the gens de couleur libres known as the Les Cenelles poets. In addition to this book project, I am writing a series of essays about the question of locality in the US South and the long history of figuring the US South and its “peculiar institutions” as categorical exceptions to normative US culture.

Teaching and Research Supervision Areas:

American Literature, African American Literature, Literatures of the American South

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

Book

Archives of American Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

Chapters and Journal Articles

"Stranger History," J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (forthcoming).

"Locality and the Serial South." Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the US South, ed. by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

"I Am A Stranger with Thee: Frederick Douglass and Recognition after 1845," American Literature (forthcoming).

“The Lyric Public of Les Cenelles,” in Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice, ed. by Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 253-73

“Close Reading the Present: Eudora Welty’s Queer Politics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. by Ellen McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 183-204

“Human beyond Understanding: Frederick Douglass’s New Liberal Individual.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 47-52

“Speech, Print, and Reform on Nantucket,” in A History of the Book in America: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, Vol. 3, ed. by Michael Winship et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 392-400

“Dialect Writing and Simultaneity in the American Historical Romance,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13, no. 3 (Winter 2002), 121-42

“Progress, Labor, Revolution: The Modern Times of African American Life Writing,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35, no. 1 (Fall 2000), 56-76

Reviews and Review Essays

“Sovereignty in the Atlantic World.”  Rev. of On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World, by Jonathan Elmer (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 2 (2011): 320-23

“Magna Opera Atlantica.” Rev. of Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940, by Laura Doyle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade, by Christopher L. Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2008): 388-96

“First the Pilgrim, then the Bee.” Rev. of The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England, by Matthew P. Brown (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) in Common-Place: A Journal of Early American Culture 8, no. 4

“New Orleans and Its Storm: Exception, Example, or Event?” Rev. of Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City, by Barbara Eckstein (New York: Routledge, 2006); Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, by Anthony J. Stanonis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); and The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, edited by Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), in American Literary History 19, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 251-65

“America Held Captive.” Rev. of Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature: 1682–1861, by Michelle Burnham (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997) in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 138–40

Editorial

"In the Event." Introduction and Guest Editor. Spec. issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 19, no. 2 (Summer 2008)

Contributors include Hayden White, Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Elmer, Andrew Aisenberg, Rebecca Wanzo, and Akira Lippit

Other Information:

Lloyd Pratt co-directed (with Jeannine DeLombard) the American Antiquarian Society's 2010 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in America. He has been a Mellon Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and Pennysylvania Historical Society, a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellow and NEMLA Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities/Bay State Historical League Scholar in Residence at the Nantucket Atheneum, and a Verney Fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. He has served on the Modern Language Association's Division Executive Committee on Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the executive committee of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. In 2010, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Before joining the Oxford English Faculty, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Michigan State University.