Brian Roberts

Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Brigham Young University. He specializes in African American literature and culture, as well as American cultures as they have intersected with oceans and islands. His first book was Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (University of Virginia Press, 2013). Since then he has published two other volumes: Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung (Duke University Press, 2016), co-translated and coedited with Kieth Foulcher), and Archipelagic American Studies (Duke University Press, 2017), co-edited with Michelle Ann Stephens. He is currently writing a book titled, “Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America” (contract with Duke University Press). His work has appeared in such journals as PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, and African American Review. In 2015 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Indonesia, and in 2018, with Keith Foulcher and Harry Aveling, he published the collaboratively translated book of short stories, Oceans of Longing, by the Indonesian modernist Sitor Situmorang.