Melissa Rauterkus
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 literary history.
I’m currently working on a new book titled “Fly Girl in the Academy: Essays on Blackness and Literary Studies.” In this collection—part memoir, part literary reflection, part critique of the field—I meditate on my experiences in higher education as a Black woman and first-generation faculty member and how these experiences have shaped my approach to literary studies. Situating these meditations within a broader conversation about the future of the English major, I argue that we need to adopt more personal and introspective methods of reading and writing about literature and culture that may better resonate with students in an era of visual media 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
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Tenure Track Appointments
- Assistant Professor of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2013 – 2017
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Research Keywords
African American Literature and African American Studies
Research Specialties
African American Literature and African American Studies
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- (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
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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. (2025). “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.
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- SAMLA Studies Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Monograph, 2021-2022
- Honorable Mention, MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize, 2020-2021
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Other Service to the University
- Dornsife Faculty Council, 2019 – 2021
- Academic Senate, 2019-2020