Mark Sanders

Director, Initiative on Race and Resilience
Professor of English and Africana Studies
English, Africana Studies

Research Interests

African American and Afro-Latin American literature and culture

Related Courses Taught

Early African American Prose, The African-American Autobiography, The Slave Narrative and Neo-Slave Narrative, Afro-Cuban Literature and Culture

Biography

A graduate of Oberlin College and Brown University, Sanders researches and teaches African American and Afro-Latin American literature and culture. More specifically, he examines the ways in which Blacks across the Western Hemisphere participate in local, national, and international print cultures of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to ameliorate material, social, and political conditions. Sanders’s courses include “Early African American Prose,” “Twentieth-Century and Contemporary African American Poetry,” “African American Autobiography,” and “Afro-Cuban Literature and Culture.”

Sanders’s books include Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell) and A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence. He is currently co-editing and co-translating (with Nohora Arrieta Fernández) the poetry of Pedro Blas Julio Romero and Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, two contemporary Afro-Colombian poets.

Sanders currently serves as the inaugural Director of the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.