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LUC’s Department of English is delighted to welcome a new professor to the faculty this spring

Dr. Frederick Staidum Jr. will be joining the Department of English faculty this spring semester as Assistant Professor specializing in African American and African diasporic literatures and cultures and gender and queer studies. He explains, "As a professor, I aim to cultivate engaged, life-long learners, who can recognize and dismantle unjust notions of normativity, hierarchy, and inequity. I hope to empower students to creatively and soundly interpret the racial, classed, gendered, and sexual representations in literature and their role in the making of the modern world. We achieve these objectives through interdisciplinary learning activities focused on cultural literacy, close reading, and aesthetic and formal analysis." Currently he is teaching an course on gothic and horror fiction focused around topics of race and an advanced course examining a "body of work that juxtaposes the human and the inhuman, the normal and the aberrant in order to wrestle with how early African-descendent authors articulated the precarity of Blackness within Western modernity." Two publications are forthcoming, “Touring Modernity’s Slavery: An Autoethnographic Digital Mapping of Leisure and Racial Spectacle in Antebellum New Orleans" in Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies (University of Georgia Press) and “African Americans and Literary Criticism" in Encyclopedia of African American Culture (forthcoming Greenwood Press). More about Dr. Staidum Jr.'s teaching and research activities can be found here.

A warm welcome to Loyola University Chicago!