Wilks, Jennifer
Associate Professor

Education: Ph.D. Cornell 2003
Office Location: PAR 329
Office Hours: On leave, 2009-2010
Phone: (512) 471-8702
jmwilks@mail.utexas.edu

Research Interests: Jennifer M. Wilks is an Associate Professor in the English department and an affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature. Her first book, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism, explores the gendered constructs and legacies of African American and Francophone Caribbean modernisms. Other teaching and research interests include the figure of the traveling heroine in contemporary African diasporic fiction, portrayals of the Southern U.S. in Caribbean literature, and Paris as a site of diasporic intellectual exchange and transformation.

Recent Publications:
Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, and Dorothy West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008. [Link] 

“Writing Home: Comparative Black Modernism and Form in Jean Toomer and Aimé Césaire.” Modern Fiction Studies 51.4 (2005): 801-23.

“New Women and New Negroes: Archetypal Womanhood in Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy.” African American Review 39.4 (2005): 569-79.

“La mulâtresse nègre: Exoticism and the Gaze in Suzanne Lacascade’s Claire-Solange, âme africaine.” MaComère 6 (2004): 57-62.

Awards and Honors: Wilks is the recipient of the 2006 Raymond Dickson Substantial Writing Component Teaching Award.