About Dr. Jarvis C. McInnis

Jarvis C. McInnis is an Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is a proud summa cum laude graduate of Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, where he earned a BA in English, and Columbia University in the City of New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature. McInnis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture with teaching and research interests in the Global South (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), black geographies and ecologies, sound studies, visual culture, and the archive. 

His first book-length monograph, Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press), charts an alternative cultural and intellectual genealogy of Black modernity by centering Booker T. Washington’s school, the Tuskegee Institute, as a crucible of black transnational and diasporic relations between southern African American and Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and cultures in the early twentieth century. McInnis’s award-winning research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholars-in-Residence Program, among others. His work appears in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, The Global South, American Literature, American Literary History, and Comparative Literature Studies.