Prospective students interested in MUSE, and learning more about graduate study in MSU’s Department of English, are encouraged to consult our faculty’s bios and research projects. For more information, please visit: https://english.msu.edu/faculty/.
Dr. Sarah Bruno
Assistant Professor, 20th and 21st Century Afro-Latinx Culture, Caribbean Studies, Popular Culture
Sarah Bruno is the Diasporas Solidarity Lab Postdoctoral Fellow (2023) and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. 2022-2023 postdoctoral fellow in Latinx Art, Cultures, and Religions in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Her research and art lie at the intersections of ethnography, performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently writing her first manuscript, Black Rican Dexterity where she uses the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba as a site and method in constructing a cartography of Black Puerto Rican femme feeling throughout history. She charges herself to continue to write with care about the never-ending process of enduring, imagining, thriving, and healing in Puerto Rico and its diaspora.
Dr. Sheila Contreras
Associate Professor, English, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Latinx/Chicanx Literature
Sheila Contreras was director of Michigan State University’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program for seven years, including a PhD program and an undergraduate specialization. Dr. Contreras’ research and teaching interests include Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o literature, multi-ethnic literatures, comparative indigeneities, and women’s studies. Contreras’ book, Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism and Chicana/o Literature, published by the University of Texas Press, examines a broad array of texts that have contributed to the formation of an indigenous strand of Chicano cultural politics. The book questions established cultural perspectives on “the native,” which paradoxically challenge and reaffirm racialized representations of Indians in the Americas.
Dr. Kinitra Brooks
Associate Professor, Literary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Popular Culture, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies
Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University and the Director of Graduate Programs in English. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture as seen in past columns for The Root on “The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country” and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR’s 1A. In process projects include an interdisciplinary anthology about Beyoncé’s Renaissance album that explores Black queerness and sexuality and a graphic novel called Red Dirt Witch about a Conjure Woman who helps with the Civil Rights Movement.
Dr. Julian C. Chambliss
Professor, Literary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Popular Culture, Digital Humanities, Global and Diasporic Studies
Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is the faculty lead for the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy, KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US.
Dr. Joshua Lam
Assistant Professor, Race and Ethnic Studies, Modernism
Joshua Lam is an Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, as well as the Associate Editor of The Space Between. His research focuses on race, science, and technology in U.S. modernism and African American literature. His current book project examines racialized automaton figures from 1880 to the 1950s. A second project explores racial objectification in contemporary experimental Black poetry. He teaches classes on modernism, Black speculative fiction, literary theory, and popular genres like horror and fantasy. Recent essays have appeared in boundary 2, the Journal of Modern Literature, and The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology.
Dr. Kaveh Askari
Associate Professor, English, Film Studies
Kaveh Askari’s research and teaching focus on cinema and media history in a global context. Special areas of interest include art cinema, media circulation, film and the other arts, and cinemas of the Middle East. He is the author of Making Movies into Art(BFI, 2014) and co-editor of Performing New Media, 1890-1915 (John Libbey, 2014). He has also co-edited special issues of Film History (South by South/West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East—South Asia Cinemas), the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Locating Muslim Cinemas), and Early Popular Visual Culture (Early Cinemas of the Middle East and North Africa). His new book is Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (University of California Press, 2022).
Dr. Divya Victor
Associate Professor, Creative Writing and 20th-Century and Contemporary Transnational Poetry and Poetics
Divya Victor is the author of KITH, a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects; NATURAL SUBJECTS, UNSUB, and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH. Her chapbooks include Semblance and Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Divya Victor is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University and Guest Editor at Jacket2. She is currently at work on a project commissioned by the Press at Colorado College.
Dr. Joseph Darda
Associate Professor, Literary Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies
Joseph Darda is a cultural historian and an associate professor of English at Michigan State University. He writes and teaches about post-1945 American literature, culture, politics, and sports. He is the author of three books on the reconfiguration of race in the age of civil rights: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His next book, Taking Talents: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2025), investigates how the sports industry has incubated ideas about race, gender, and advantage since civil rights.
Dr. Zarena Aslami
Associate Professor, 19th-Century British Literature and Culture
Zarena Aslami’s research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Special areas of interest include empire, history and theory of the novel, feminism, psychoanalysis, and disability studies. Her current book project, Sovereign Anxieties: Victorian Afghanistan and the Literatures of Empire, continues this line of inquiry, examining the affective content of political forms in a transnational context. Broadly, a study of the British Empire, Sovereign Anxieties focuses on the case of Afghanistan, tracking how and why nineteenth-century British discourse cast it as vague and inassimilable. The project gathers Victorian representations, including military memoirs, photographs, and fiction, of the three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839 to 1919) and pays particular attention to how the British imagined Afghan political authority.
Dr. Jeff Wray
Professor, English, Film Studies
Jeffrey Wray, The Evolution of Bert (2014) premiered at the 2014 50th Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) in the New Directors competition. Bert also screened in the Black Perspectives program and was in competition for the Roger Ebert Award at the CIFF. Other films include China (2003) funded by and produced for PBS, The Soul Searchers: Three Stories (2008) and two films in post-production; the concert film BLAT! Pack Live and the short drama Songs for my Right Side. Films have screened in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Zurich and Berlin. China was broadcast nationally in the U.S. during 2003 and 2004. Grants and honors include a PBS/Independent Television Service (ITVS) American Stories III Production Grant, John Anson Kittredge Foundation Fellowship, Art Serve Michigan Individual Artist Award, Ohio Arts Council Major Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Film and Video Fellowship nominations and a filmmaker residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University. All films produced by Tama Hamilton-Wray & Jeffrey C. Wray.
Dr. Pedro Doreste Rodríguez
Assistant Professor, Film Studies, Caribbean/Latinx Culture
Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez is Assistant Professor in the Film Studies program at Michigan State University. As a historian of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx film, he is interested in film collaborations between the Global North and South, studies of media infrastructures, documentary, and diasporic or exile film. He conjures and consults cine-clubs, film libraries, microcinemas, film archives, lost films, journals and magazines, unfilmed scripts, banned or censored films, obscure co-productions, amateur film, etc. to piece together expressions of film culture ratified offscreen or underground—and often neglected by conventional film historiography. He is also the co-director of The Manchineel Project and core faculty member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Chicano and Latino Studies program at MSU. Currently, Dr. Doreste Rodríguez is in the initial stages of co-editing, along with Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez, an anthology on Puerto Rican film studies, which is slated for publication in 2026.
Dr. Justus Nieland
Chairperson, Department of English
Justus Nieland is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of English at Michigan State University, and he teaches in the Film Studies Program. He specializes in modernism and film history, and his research interests include affect theory; media theory; industrial, avant-garde, and experimental film; the film noir; global modernist cinemas; modern and contemporary literature; and modern design and architectural history.
His most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.