Joseph Rezek

For CV, click here.

I specialize in early and nineteenth-century American literature, the history of the book, early Black Atlantic literature, the Age of Revolution, and the history of race and racism. In my work I tell new stories about the relationship between the technology of print and the literature, history, and culture of the Anglophone world, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. 

The book I am currently finishing, The Racialization of Print (forthcoming from the Omohundro Institute and UNC Press), was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities for the 2024-2025 academic year. It traces the historical emergence of the belief that a single book, by virtue of its author’s racial identity, can reveal profound truths about an entire race of people. Drawing on a decade of archival research, as well as the works of authors like John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass, this project offers a corrective to our still common desire to approach books with assumptions about extracting racial knowledge. For an overview of the project’s argument and a case-study involving Wheatley and Samson Occom, see my 2020 essay in American Literary History.

My next book project is a short work for a popular audience that asks what we can learn from writers and activists of the Age of Revolution if we consider them not with the rigidity of our modern pieties, but instead with sympathy and grace. It consists of four sketches of the careers and writings of Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint Louverture — with a focus on how they used media to change the world.

My first book, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), considered Romantic-era authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States, who sought the prestige and exposure that only publishers in London could provide.

For more about my work and scholarship, see my personal webpage. 

I am currently serving a second term as Director of American Studies at BU (I was previously Director from 2021-2024). I am Co-Chair of the American Literature and Culture Seminar at the Mahindra Center at Harvard University, which I co-founded in 2012. 

Recent Publications:

• “Haiti and the Literature of Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism (Winter 2023): 531–539.
• “Structures of Belonging and Nonbelonging: On Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons.” Los Angeles Review of Books (February, 2023).

• “Early Black Evangelical Writing and the Limits of Print” in African American Literature in Transition, 1750-1800 (2022), ed. Rhondda Robinson Thomas.

• “Early African American Literature and the British Empire, 1808-1835” in African American Literature In Transition, 1800-1830 (2021) ed. Jasmine Nicole Cobb.
• “Transatlantic Traffic: Phillis Wheatley and Her Books,” in The Unfinished Book (2021), ed. Alexandria Gillespie and Deidre Lynch.
• “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32.3 (Fall 2020).
• “Popular Transatlantic Currents in the Literary Book Trade.” In The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: U.S. Popular Print Culture to 1860 (2019), ed. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Zboray.
• “Author.” Brief essay about John Marrant for “Keywords” special issue of Early American Studies (2018), ed, Marcy Dinius and Sonia Hazard.
• London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850. University of Pennsylvania Press: Material Text Series, 2015.  For the full introduction and table of contents, click here.

Selected Honors, Grants, and Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (12 months), July 2024-June 2025.
• American Antiquarian Society, NEH-funded archival fellowship (one semester), Spring 2020.
• Library Company of Philadelphia, NEH-funded archival fellowship (one semester), Fall 2016. 
• Steven Botein Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society (one month), 2016.
• Short-Term Resident Fellowship. Newberry Library, Chicago, IL (one month), 2012.
• Katharine Pantzer Fellowship in the British Book Trades. Bibliographical Society of America, 2012.
• Richard Beale Davis Prize. Awarded biennially by the MLA Division of American Literature to 1800, for the best article published in Early American Literature. 2009-2010, for “The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic.”
• Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2009-2011.