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Dr.
Eric Gardner Professor of English
office: Brown 317 email: gardner@svsu.edu phone: 989.964.4037 snail: |
Eric Gardner teaches a
wide range of courses in American literature/culture. After growing up in Peotone,
Illinois, he attended Illinois
Wesleyan University (B.A.) and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M.A., Ph.D.); he joined SVSU's English
Department in 1996 and served two terms as Department Chair (2006-2010). He
won SVSU's Earl L. Warrick Award for Research Excellence in 2010.
Dr. Gardner's research focuses on nineteenth-century African American writers and activists. His book Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2009) received a four-star "essential" rating from Choice and won the 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize. Unexpected Places argues for a large-scale remapping of early Black literature through presenting case studies of antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and a range of Civil War and post-bellum sites in Ohio and New Jersey that were tied to the Philadelphia-based Christian Recorder.
Gardner has also edited three books: Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery (Toby, 2005), which shares a rich range of early American drama about slavery including plays by Black writers like William Wells Brown and Pauline Hopkins; Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (UP of Mississippi, 2007), which recovers the work of "Semper Fidelis," a columnist for the Reconstruction-era San Francisco Elevator; and, with John Ernest, a new edition of J. McHenry Jones's 1896 novel Hearts of Gold (West Virginia UP, 2010).
An SVSU Braun Fellow, Gardner
has written on American and especially African American literature and culture
for journals like PMLA,
New England Quarterly,
Legacy, and African
American Review; essay collections like Everyday
eBay (Routledge, 2006) and Harriet
Wilson's New England (UP of New England, 2007); and reference books
like African
American Lives (Oxford UP, 2004) and the African
American National Biography (Oxford UP, 2008). He has done key biographical
and critical work on figures like Philip Bell, Lucy Delaney, William Greenly,
Chloe Russel, Elisha Weaver, Frank J. Webb, Mary Webb, and Harriet Wilson, and
he is deeply interested in the production and circulation of early Black texts.
His on-going research projects include further work on the early Black press
and on nineteenth-century African American literary communities and individuals
in "unexpected places."
Active in campus life,
Gardner served, at various times prior to his initial 2006 election as Chair
of SVSU's largest department, as SVSU's First-Year Writing Coordinator, Writing
Center Coordinator, General Education Committee member, Professional Practices
Committee member (promotion/tenure), and Faculty Association Executive Board
member, as well as co-editor of SVSU's
NCA/HLC 2004 Self-Study. He is also the former Vice-Chair of the Library
Board of Midland, Michigan, and he is a life member of the Society for the
Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW)
and the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States
(MELUS). He is currently
the Membership Officer of the Pauline E. Hopkins Society.
He urges everyone to read more. A wonderful tool for finding books and more is available through WorldCat:
University
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