Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus

African American Literature and African American Studies

I’m a Southern California native, born and raised in Monrovia, and I research and teach classes in African American literature and culture.

I’m currently working on a new book project, “Fly Girl in the Academy,” which argues for the use of autocritography as a central methodology for African American literary studies. I posit that this merger of personal narrative and criticism can not only open up new ways to read African American literature now, but it may also attract more students, especially Black ones, to the discipline in an era of STEM and plummeting humanities enrollments. 

My first book, Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), which won the SAMLA Studies Book Award and received Honorable Mention for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, argues that during the nadir, 1877-1919, Black and white writers used more speculative forms of realism to reimagine Black representation in fiction as well as the future of race in America. In this way, I challenge facile generalizations about what constitutes a “Black text,” how we define the project of literary realism, and problematic assumptions about literary history and the segregated nature of literary invention.  

• Ph.D. English, Northwestern University, 2012
• M.A. English, Northwestern University, 2006
• M.A. English, Claremont Graduate University, 2005
• B.A. English, University of La Verne, 2003