William Scott’s areas of specialization are twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture; poetry and poetics; modernism; philosophy (idealism and phenomenology); and contemporary critical theory. His current research interests are focused on questions involving the body, performance, historicity, and representation, as well as the problematic relation, underlying historical narratives, between “scenes of subjection” (Saidiya Hartman) and the formation of a resistant agency. He received his MA in German and his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins University.

His first book, Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker, was recently published by Rutgers University Press (2012). He is currently working on a study of various modes of formal abstraction in U.S. modernist literature entitled Consuming Gazes: Violence and Idealization in American Modernism.

Articles:

• “Modernism in Translation,” ADFL Bulletin, Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, MLA, vol. 41 no. 2 (Winter 2009): 42-47.
• “Revolutionary Acts of Translation: Language and Freedom in Guy Endore’s Babouk,” in Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2004, edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), 111-121.
• “Belonging to History: Margaret Walker’s For My People,” MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 121 no. 5 (December 2006): 1083-1106.
• “Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street,” American Literature, vol. 78 no. 1 (March 2006): 89-116.
• “Motivos of Translation: Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 5 no. 2 (Fall 2005): 35-71.
• “‘To Make Up the Hedge and Stand in the Gap’: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder,” Callaloo, vol. 27 no. 2 (Spring 2004): 522-41.

Book Reviews:

• “Capturing the Present: Performativity and Pop Literature in Germany,” review essay of Eckhard Schumacher, Gerade Eben Jetzt: Schreibweisen der Gegenwart, in The German Quarterly, vol. 78 no. 1 (Winter 2005): 124-128.
• “Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” in MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 116 no. 5 (December 2001): 1102-1105.
• “The Radical Novel Reconsidered. Alfred Maund, The Big Boxcar; Abraham Polonsky, The World Above,” in MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 114 no. 5 (December 1999): 1146-1150.
• “Martin Heidegger (Joan Stambaugh [trans.]), Being and Time, a Translation of Sein und Zeit,” in MLN, German Issue, vol. 113 no. 3 (April 1998): 692-695.

Teaching:

• Graduate Courses

• Aesthetics and Politics: Modernism and Mass Production
• Modernism in African American Poetry
• The Blues Woman: Race and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century African American Women’s Fiction
• Studies in U.S. Fiction: The Radical Novel in the Great Depression

• Undergraduate Courses
• • Senior Seminar: Invisibility in the Twentieth Century African American Novel
  • Junior Seminar: Modernism in American Poetry
  • Topics in Black Lit: Black Arts/Black Power, 1960-1975
  • Topics in Black Lit: Modernism in African American Literature
  • The Modernist Tradition
  • 20th Century American Literature
  • Sexuality and Representation
  • Working Class Literature
  • Literature of the Americas
  • American Literary Traditions
  • Intro to Critical Reading
  • Literature and the Contemporary

University Service:

• Graduate Admissions Committee
• Graduate Placement and Professional Development Committee
• Literature Curriculum Committee
• Junior/Senior Seminar Assessment Committee
• Planning and Budget Committee
• Senior American Literature Search Committee

Other Duties and Service:

• Member: MLA, AAUP
• Reviewer for Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and The Philosophy of History