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, Our Promised Land: Blackness, Land Loss, and the New Great Migration, and a book on Black kinship and family silences, I Can't Make You Speak. 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
20th and 21st-century African American culture and history, mutual aid, 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
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
Multiracial Democracy Manuscript Award for Dreams of the Present, Campus Research Board, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2019: workshopped book with Fred Moten and Roderick Ferguson, New York, January 2020
Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, 2017-18
Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 2016-17
John W. Kluge Fellow for a New Generation of Faculty Excellence, Columbia University, 2008
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)
“The Postwar Era and Contemporary American Literature” (452)
“Introduction to the Study of Literature and Culture” (200)
“Black Literature in America” (150)
“Modern African American Literature” (260)
“Love and Sound: Writing about Literature” (360)
“Utopian Economies in African American Literature” (461)
“The American Novel since 1914” (251)
“African American Literature from the Beginnings to 1915” (259)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
External Links
Highlighted Publications
BOOKS
Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
ARTICLES:
“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 2022): 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
“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.