Herman Beavers
President @Modern Language Association
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WORK HISTORY
President @Modern Language Association
New York, NY, US
EDUCATION
Yale University
Ph.D., American Studies
Oberlin College
B.A., Government, Sociology, and Creative Writing
Brown University
M.A., English
Yale University
M.A., African American Studies
SKILLS
ABOUT HERMAN BEAVERS
Specialties: 20th and 21st Century African American literature, African American poetry and poetics, Jazz Studies, Chaos Theory and African American literature, Geocriticism/Spatial Literary Studies, Gender Studies (esp. Black masculinity), Access and Retention of underrepresented minorities, mentoring minority undergraduate and graduate students.I am the author of two scholarly monographs and three poetry chapbooks. I co-teach a course on the African American playwright, August Wilson which brings together University of Pennsylvania students with West Philadelphia residents to study Wilson\'s plays and to highlight the importance of storytelling. Our students conduct interviews in and around Philadelphia, which become the basis for a thematically linked series of my monologues performed by professional actors (along with student actors depending on casting requirements). I also teach a poetry workshop along with my other literature courses, which includes a course on Toni Morrison\'s fiction.My pedagogical approach to teaching is heavily influenced by the writings of Paolo Friere and bell hooks. My teaching seeks to foreground the importance of facilitating a wide range of dialogues about literature, to be sure, but also about the historic, cultural, and social contexts that inform acts of both writing and reading. Why do writers generate books at specific moments in time and why do people read them?
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