Programs and Areas
African-American Literature Area
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, from the American Memory Collection (Library of Congress).
English Department at Ohio State University has a number of faculty with strong interests in African American culture from various perspectives including literature, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and socio-linguistics. The historical range of African American literature from slave narratives to contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama is represented in such courses as 281: Introduction to African American Literature and 582: Special Topics in African American Literature, and 851: Seminar in Critical Approaches to Black Literature, as well as in other more general courses that include black writers. The composition and rhetoric faculty has several scholars who specialize in issues related to black writing and oratory, and the Department's socio-linguist has conducted research on black speech and dialect. Several folklorists in the Department have written about African American oral traditions and how they relate to written literature. These cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of African American literature are one of the strengths of the program at Ohio State.
