Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus

African American Literature and African American Studies

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

I’m currently working on a new book titled “Fly Girl in the Academy,” a memoir and study of contemporary African American literature. In this collection of essays, I use autocritography as a means of illuminating my experiences as a Black woman in academia and African American writing after the Civil Rights era. I posit that this merger of personal narrative and literary criticism can open up new ways to read and write about literature that may resonate with a broader audience and attract more students, especially Black ones, to literary studies 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, focuses on literary production during the nadir, 1877-1919. I explore how 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