Gary E. Holcomb, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Contact Information
Phone: (740) 593 1308
Fax: (740) 593 0671
Office: 308 Lindley Hall
Email:holcomb@ohio.edu

Education
Ph.D. English, Washington State University, 1995
M.A. English, California State University, Long Beach, 1988
B.A. English (Creative Writing option), California State University, Long Beach, 1984

Biography
Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Americas Gary Edward Holcomb's research is in African American, African Diaspora, and black transnational literatures, particularly twentieth-century writings, with critical foci on the Harlem Renaissance, Great Depression period, and Black Arts movement. Related to his research and writing on the interwar phase, he works in black countercultural movements, the merging of queer, black, and radical, through the application of cultural studies and critical race theory.

He is presently organizing the Claude McKay Society for the Department of African American Studies, with plans to hold the first international conference in 2011. Professor Holcomb is now also serving as Editor of the AAS journal, Black Praxis, with plans for an issue on McKay to appear in 2010.

His Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007) won honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award. Reviewed by Charles Scruggs in American Literature and James Smethurst in American Literary History, as well as Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Callaloo, and Radical History Review, it is also recognized in the annual research roundups American Literary Scholarship (2007), published by Duke University Press, 2009, and The Year’s Work in Cultural and Critical Theory 17.1 (2009). It is scheduled to appear in paperback, available on demand from University Press of Florida, in Fall 2009.

Professor Holcomb has attended numerous conferences and has given a number of public talks. On the occasion of McKay's 118th birthday, 15 September 2007, he was invited to speak at McKay Day, a book launch party for Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha. McKay Day was coordinated by and held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library and premier Black Studies public research institute. He has also given lectures on queer black Marxist writing of the Harlem Renaissance for the USC College Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and at the Langston Hughes Center, in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas.

In March 2009 he was invited to speak at the University of Arizona's Arizona Quarterly Symposium, where he talked on the subject of McKay, Wright, and transnational mapping. Cultivating his own international exchanges, he has talked on black transnational literary and film cultures at universities in Germany and Romania, including American Studies institutes at the University of Osnabruck and the University of Bucharest. In addition to presenting at conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Jamaica, he has shared his research at scholarly meetings in France, Germany, Romania, and Spain. Moreover, he has taught courses in African American literature in Central and Eastern Europe, as Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies and Literature in Romania, during the academic year of 1998-1999 and again in 2004-2005, and as Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies in Germany, in Summer of 2006.

Professor Holcomb is currently occupied with two book-length projects and related efforts. He is co-editing Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, for Kent State University Press, a collection of essays by a range of scholars on the various, complex ways the likes of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison respond to the instance of the white American modernist. He is also at work on a book that enlarges the theoretical focus of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha, examining the works of writers like Countee Cullen, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Wallace Thurman, as well as reading beyond the Harlem Renaissance to the queer black Marxism of Bob Kaufman and Audre Lorde.

Selected Bibliography and Recent Publications
Articles
"The Sun Also Rises in Queer Black Harlem: Hemingway and McKay's Modernist Intertext." Journal of Modern Literature 30.4 (Sept. 2007): 61-81.

"Claude McKay's "The Biter Bit': Calalu" and Caribbean Colonialism." Callaloo 30.1 (Winter 2007): 311-14.

"New Negro, New American Studies in Becoming-EU Europe." REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 23 (2007): 259-73.

"Code Name"Sasha": Claude McKay Dines "Out" on America." University of Bucharest Review: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 7.3 (2005): 32-40.

"The Harlem Renaissance, Caribbean Radicalism, and Black Liberation Struggle: McKay's Harlem: Negro Metropolis." Journal of Caribbean Studies 18:1&2 (Fall 2003/Spring 2004): 71-78.

"Diaspora Cruises: Queer Black Proletarianism in Claude McKay's A Long Way from Home." Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (Winter 2003): 714-41.

"Travels of a Transnational "Slut": Sexual Migration in Kincaid's Lucy." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.3 (Spring 2003): 295-312.

"I Made Him": Sadomasochism in Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother." Callaloo 25.3 (Summer 2002): 969-76.

Books
Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance. Coeditor, with Charles W. Scruggs. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, forthcoming 2010.

Courses Taught
AAS 106 Introduction to African American Studies
AAS 110 Introduction to African American Literature
AAS 210 African American Literature II
AAS 211 African American Literature in Ohio
AAS 311 African American Literature Special Topics
AAS 410 Carribean Literature
AAS 411 Literature in the African Diaspora