Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

Associate Professor of English and African and Afro-American Studies

Departments/Programs

English

Degrees

New York University, Ph.D.
New York University, M.A.
SUNY at Stony Brook, B.A.

Expertise

American and African American Literature and Culture; Critical Race Theory; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Multiethnic Feminisms

Profile

I am an associate professor of English and African and Afro American Studies, with affiliations in Women's and Gender Studies and American Studies. My research interests include 19th to 21st-century American and African American literature and culture, gender studies and multiethnic feminisms, and theories of race and racial formation. My first book, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, was published by Duke University Press in 2012. Considering genres from the slave narrative to science fiction, Against the Closet analyzes African American literary depictions of transgressive sexualities in order to illuminate the ways in which race, politics, and sexuality intersect in the social/racial ordering of United States culture and in the making of African American literature. I am currently at work on a new book project that analyzes the ideological and political implications of generic experimentation in black cultural production of the "post-racial" period.

Courses Taught

AAAS	79b	Afro-American Literature of the Twentieth Century
AAAS	136a	Black Feminist Thought
ENG	1a	Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG	16a	Slavery and Self-Making in African American Literature
ENG	57b	Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
ENG	70b	Science Fiction
ENG	87a	Sex and Race in the American Novel
ENG	151a	Queer Studies
ENG	167b	20th-century Black Fiction
ENG	207a	Race, Desire, and the Literary Imagination
ENG	227b	American Encounters: Faulkner, Baldwin, Roth, Morrison

Awards and Honors

Darwin T. Turner Award for Best Essay in African American Review, 2008, 2006 (2008)

Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008)

Darwin T Turner Award, MLA Division on Black American Literature and Culture (2006)

Alice Richardson Outstanding Dissertation Award, New York University (2005)

Shortell-Holzer (Dean's) Dissertation Fellowship, New York University (2004)

Ford Foundation Fellowship (2003)

Scholarship

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. ""What Moves at the Margin": William Faulkner and Race." Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. John T. Mathews., 2014 (forthcoming)

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. "Tracings: Black Female Figuration in Inner and Outer Space(s)." Callaloo (2009). (forthcoming)

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. ""This Horrible Exhibition": Sexuality in Slave Narratives." The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. John Ernest., 2014

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. "“The Trope of the Tongue: Reading Alice Walker’s Liberationist Narratives.”." Annual International Conference on Narrative, 2011.

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. ""Simply a Menaced Boy:" Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room." African American Review 41.3. Fall 2007 (2008): 477-486.

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. "Harriet Ann Jacobs." The Encyclopedia of Women in World History. 2007.

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. "White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner's Light in August." The Faulkner Journal Volume 22.1 & 2. Fall/Spring (2007).

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. ""The Strangest Freaks of Despotism": Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African Slave Narratives." African American Review 40.2. Summer (2006): 223-237.