Ernest Julius Mitchell

Ernest Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities, with a secondary appointment in African American Studies. His research centers on modernist literature written by black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic between the world wars, particularly in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. His first book, forthcoming with Yale University Press, will be a biography of Claude McKay, the Jamaican-born writer who spent his life abroad in the U.S., Europe, Russia, and North Africa. He is preparing an edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane and a book on religion in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. His articles are published or forthcoming in Amerikastudien/American Studies, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Callaloo. He was previously Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies (2019). Before this, he received an M.T.S. in Religion and Literature from Harvard Divinity School (2009) and an A.B. in Religion from Princeton University (2006).