{"id":5878,"date":"2015-06-20T13:06:38","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T17:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www-staging.bu.edu\/amnesp\/?post_type=profile&p=5878"},"modified":"2025-12-05T14:00:47","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T19:00:47","slug":"joseph-rezek","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/americanstudies\/profile\/joseph-rezek\/","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Rezek"},"content":{"rendered":"

For CV,\u00a0<\/span>click here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are still open seats in a seminar I am teaching in Spring, 2026: “Revolutionary Icons” (AM 502 C1).<\/strong> T<\/span>imed for the 250th anniversary of the American War for Independence, the course will consider literature that shaped the Age of Revolution and its legacy — including texts by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Toussaint Louverture, and Mary Wollstonecraft. (It is HUB-ed for\u00a0<\/span>Writing-Intensive & Research and Information Literacy.)<\/p>\n

The book I am currently finishing, <\/span>The Racialization of Print<\/span><\/i> (forthcoming from the <\/span>Omohundro Institute and UNC Press<\/span><\/a>), 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\u2019s 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\u2019s argument and a case-study involving Wheatley and Samson Occom, <\/span>see my 2020 essay in <\/span>American Literary History<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

My next book project will be 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 \u2014 with a focus on how they used media to change the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

My first book, <\/span>London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850<\/span><\/i><\/a> (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.<\/span><\/p>\n

For more about my work and scholarship, see my <\/span>personal webpage<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am currently serving a second term as <\/span>Director of American Studies at BU<\/span><\/a> (I was previously Director from 2021-2024). I am Co-Chair of the <\/span>American Literature and Culture Seminar<\/span><\/a>\u00a0at the Mahindra Center at Harvard University, which I co-founded in 2012.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Recent Publications:<\/b><\/p>\n