Gillian Johns

Biography

I regularly teach courses in American and African American literature and literary culture, in such areas as African American detective fiction, modern African American literary humor and irony, black women writers and autobiographical subjectivity, modernism in Chicago cultures of letters, and orality and literacy in works by major black writers.

I have a special interest in modernist black authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and have conducted research on these authors. Some of my more general interests are in rhetoric and reader response theory; humor, comedy, and irony; critical race theory; narrative and genre theory; and transformations in high and low cultural studies.