Mark A. Sanders (B.A., Oberlin College, 1985; Ph.D., Brown University, 1992) specializes in early twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture, more specifically, the connections between "mainstream" American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. His research interests also include American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Cuban and Afro-Latino literature and culture. Professor Sanders teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century African American literature and culture, exploring issues of racial and cultural identity, citizenship, and freedom. He also teaches courses on Afro-Cuban literature and culture of the colonial, republican, and revolutionary eras.

Selected Publications:

Books:

• A Black Soldier's Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (a translation of Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
  

• Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell) New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  

• Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
  

Articles:

• "Toward a modernist poetics," in The Cambridge History of African American Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr.: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011: 220-237.

• “Afterward: The Black Flame Then and Now,” in The Black Flame: A Trilogy, Book One, The Ordeal of Mansart (also published in Book Two and Book Three) by W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 231-245.

• “African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 96-111.