Brent Edwards
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Brent Hayes Edwards is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and was runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP 2004). Edwards has three books forthcoming in early 2017: his monograph Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which will be published by Harvard University Press; the scholarly edition of Claude McKay’s recently discovered last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, co-edited with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and to be published by Penguin Classics; and Edwards’s translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull Books), for which Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards’s current projects include a monograph titled “Art of the Lecture,” for which he was awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Working Group Affiliations
The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories