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Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus

Associate Professor of English
Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Pronouns She / Her / Hers Email rauterku@usc.edu Office THH 439 Office Phone (213) 740-2808

Research & Practice Areas

African American Literature and African American Studies

Biography

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

I’m currently working on a new book titled “Fly Girl in the Academy: Essays on Being Black and Doing Literary Studies.” In this collection of essays—part memoir, part literary analysis, part critique of the field—I reflect on my experiences in higher education as a Black woman and first-generation faculty member. I discuss how these experiences have shaped my approach to doing literary studies as a scholar and teacher. Situating these reflections within a broader conversation about the future of the English major, I argue that we need to adopt more personal and introspective and less theoretical methods of reading and writing about literature that will attract more students 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, focuses on literary production during the nadir, 1877-1919. I explore how Black and white writers used more romantic and 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. 

 

Education

  • 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

  • Tenure Track Appointments

    • Assistant Professor of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2013 – 2017

  • Research Keywords

    African American Literature and African American Studies

    Research Specialties

    African American Literature and African American Studies

    • (Fall 2023) ENGL 446. Afro-American Poetry and Drama, TTh, 12:30pm – 01:50pm
    • (Spring 2024) ENGL 491. Senior Seminar in Literary Studies, Th, 02:00pm – 04:20pm, THH111
    • (Spring 2024) GESM 120. Seminar in Humanistic Inquiry – Crime and Punishment in LA, TTh, 12:30pm – 01:50pm, KAP166
    • (Spring 2025) ENGL 441. American Literature, 1865 to 1920, MW, 02:00pm – 03:20pm
    • (Spring 2025) ENGL 447. African-American Narrative, MW, 10:00am – 11:20am

  • Book

    • Daniels-Rauterkus, M. (2020). Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. URL

    Book Chapters

    • Daniels-Rauterkus, M. (2024). “The New Jack Renaissance: Black Literary and Cultural Production and the Institutionalization of African American Literary Studies”. African American Literature in Transition, 1990-2000 Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.
    • Daniels-Rauterkus, M. (2022). “Andrea Lee’s Europe: Race, Interracial Desire, and Transnationalism”. The Oxford Handbook of 20th-Century American Lit pp. 281-298. New York: Oxford UP. URL

    Journal Article

    • Daniels, M. (2013). The Limits of Literary Realism: Of One Blood’s Post-Racial Fantasy”. Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. Vol. 36 (1), pp. 158-177.
    • Daniels, M., Laski, G., Bradley, A., Ernest, J., Diggs Colbert, S., Castronovo, R., Holland, S. P., Warren, K. W. (2011). “Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or The State of the Field in the New Millennium”. African American Review. Vol. 44 (4), pp. 567-591.
    • SAMLA Studies Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Monograph, 2021-2022
    • Honorable Mention, MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize, 2020-2021

  • Other Service to the University

    • Dornsife Faculty Council, 2019 – 2021
    • Academic Senate, 2019-2020
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