Department of English

Professor of English and Coordinator, M. A, in Liberal Studies Program
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin

Office: CAS 227
Telephone: (908) 737-0388
Email: jgruesse@kean.edu
Website: www.kean.edu/~keangrad/grad_CHSS_ls.htm

Fellowships, Honors, and Awards:

• 2002 Kean University Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Scholarship
• 1999 Induction into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, Kean University
• 1994 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, Princeton University: Literary History in Theory and Practice
• 1993 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Black on Black: African American Writing about Africa
• 1990 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, University of California, Berkeley: The Problem of Race in American and Afro-American Literature, 1860-1930
• 1981 Election to Phi Beta Kappa, University of Notre Dame

Courses Taught:

• Advanced Interdisciplinary Seminar II: Liberal Studies
• African American Literature
• African American Women Writers
• American Autobiography
• American Literature from 1860
• American Literature to 1860
• American Novel 1920 to the Present
• Aspects of the Novel
• Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Theory
• Composition
• Contemporary Literature
• Critical Approaches to Literature
• Detective Fiction
• Honors American Autobiography
• Senior English Seminar
• World Literature
• Writing about Literature

Publications:

Books

• (Ed. with Hanna Wallinger) Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2009.
• Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic, Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005
• (Ed.) The Black Sleuth, by John Edward Bruce, Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002
• Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa, Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000
• (Ed.) The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Intro. Nellie Y. McKay, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996
• White on Black: Contemporary Literature about Africa, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992

Periodicals

• African American Review
• American Drama
• Black American Literature Forum
• CEA Critic
• College English Notes
• Edgar Allan Poe Review
• The Explicator
• Journal of African Travel-Writing
• Journal of Caribbean Literaturesv
• Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies
• Mid-American Review
• Nerter
• Studies in Short Fiction