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College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of English

Irvin Hunt

Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Dean's Fellow in Inclusive Excellence for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Conrad Humanities Scholar

Biography

With special attention to the relationship among activism, land, and cultural production, his research and teaching focus on African American literature and history, Black social movements, mutual aid, and the politics of Black humor.

Hunt is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how Black artists and activist pioneered practices of mutual aid and fundamentally changed what a social movement can be. It was honorable mention for the William Scarborough Sanders Prize of the Modern Language Associations, a prize awarded annually to an outstanding scholarly study in Black American literature or culture, short listed for the Stone Book Award, which recognizes the most exemplary contemporary scholarship and writing within the field of African American history and culture, and a finalist for the Best New Book in African American History and Culture from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. His work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books, Dilettante Army, Post45, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John W. Kluge Foundation, and the NAACP. His is currently working on two books, What Comes After: Loss and Living in Black Women's Poetry, an exploration of a new language for modern grief in the wake of the carceral state, and  Bitter Tea: Stories. Hunt was the 2022-23 Helen Corley Petit Scholar for an extraordinary record of scholarship and teaching and was awarded for the same a Conrad Humanities Scholarship. He currently serves the college as the Deans's Fellow in Inclusive Excellence. 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Interests

 African American culture and history, contemporary poetry,  mutual aid practices, social movement theory, performance studies, affect studies, and humor studies.  

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University (2014); M.A., University of California, Berkeley (2007); B.A., Morehouse College (2005).

Awards and Honors

Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow, 2025

Honorable mention for the William Scarborough Sanders Prize of the Modern Language Associations

Short listed for the Stone Book Award

Finalist for the Best New Book in African American History and Culture from the ASAALH

Helen Corley Petit Scholar, 2022-23 

Finalist for the Elizabeth Nunez Short Fiction Prize for “Bitter Tea,” Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival, 2021

Courses Taught

GRADUATE

"The Question of Tomorrow: Black Women Poets and Radical Black Futures" (553)

“Mourning in Comic Time” (553)

 

UNDERGRADUATE  

"The Black Arts Movement" (455) 

"Exploring Arts and Creativity" (FAA 110)

 

Additional Campus Affiliations

Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Highlighted Publications

BOOKS

Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)

 

ARTICLES:

"Inner Weather: A Response to Jeffrey Lawrence's 'Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post 1945 US,'" Post45 (Spring 2025)

“How Literature Understands Poverty: An Introduction,” co-authored with Kinohi Nishikawa, Clare Callahan, and Joseph Entin, Special Issue of American Literature (Spring 2022).

“This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar,” Dilettante Army (Fall 2021).

“Planned Failure: George Schuyler and the Young Negroes Cooperative Guild,” American Quarterly 72.4 (2020): 853-879.

“Necromance,” American Literary History 31.4 (2019): 829–839.

“The Hesitations of Speculative History,” Contemporaries at Post45 (February 2019).

“The Humor We Fear Most,” Contemporaries at Post45 (February 2019).

Get Out: Not An Invitation, But a Warning,” Public Books (May 2017).

“On Ava Duvernay,” Public Books (Feb 2016).

Saints on the Dollar,” Public Books (Jul 2014).

Everybody’s Protest Play?” Public Books (Jan 2014).

 

BOOK CHAPTERS:

“Unco-Opted: Cooperative Economics as Counter Surveillance,” African American Literature: In Transition, 1940-50, Cambridge University Press (Spring 2025): 23,766 words.

“‘There Wont Be Inny Show Tonite’: Humoring the Returns of Scopic Violence in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus," History and Humor: British and American Perspectives, eds. Doris Lechner and Barbara Korte, Transcript Press, Germany (October 2013): 81-103.

 

REVIEWS 

This World Is Not My Home: A Critical Biography of African American Writer Charles Wright, by Lawrence Hogue, in Resources for African American Literary Study (April 2025)

“Bread and Salt in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Caxtonian (April/May 2021): 8-9.

Review of The Ethics of Swagger and The Time Is Always Now, American Literature, 87 (Dec 2015): 622-24. 

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of English

608 South Wright Street

MC-718

Urbana, IL 61801

(217) 333-2391

Email: english@illinois.edu

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