David Luis-Brown is an associate professor in the Cultural Studies and English Departments at Claremont Graduate University. His research specializations include hemispheric Americas studies, Latino/a/x studies, black diaspora studies, and American literature and culture in general. Using a transnational, hemispheric Americas approach, Luis-Brown teaches interdisciplinary and interethnic courses on issues of race and imperialism in United States and on Latin American literature and culture.
Luis-Brown received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since then, he has been the recipient of a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship, and a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press, 2008). His most recent article is “Slave Rebellion and the Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a Neglected Cuban Antislavery Novel by Orihuela.” He is also the author of “An 1848 for the Americas: the Black Atlantic, ‘El negro mártir,’ and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism.” His essay “Cuban Negrismo, Mexican Indigenismo: Contesting Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement” was included in the collection Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, edited by Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani and published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Luis-Brown is working on two books: a critical edition and translation of Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s Cuban 1854 antislavery novel, El Sol de Jesús del Monte, under submission at a university press; and Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Culture. One of the chief aims of Blazing at Midnight is to assess techniques of social categorization in predisciplinary social science, travel narratives, novels, periodicals, and visual culture.
“The Transnational Imaginaries of Chicano/a Studies and Hemispheric Studies: Polycentric and Centrifugal Methodologies.” In New Chicano/a Narratives: History, Form and Nation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Yolanda Padilla and Bill Orchard. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, Forthcoming.
“Cuban Negrismo, Mexican Indigenismo: Contesting Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement.” Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, edited by Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, 53–76. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Review of Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne. American Historical Review 120, no. 4 (2015): 1454–55.
“Slave Rebellion and the Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a Neglected Cuban Antislavery Novel by Orihuela.” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 209–30.
Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
“An 1848 for the Americas: The Black Atlantic, ‘El negro mártir,’ and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City.” American Literary History 21, no. 3 (2009): 431–63.
Black Diaspora Cultural Studies
Hemispheric Americas
Comparative Cultural Studies
American Literature and Political Theory, 18th Century to the Present
Race in the Americas
Comparative Slaveries in the Americas
Nineteenth-Century American Pop Culture
U.S. Latino/a Literature and Culture