Ivy Wilson

Northwestern University

Ivy Wilson is an Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Northwestern University. His book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQArizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century.