Rod K. Taylor is an assistant professor of English and a teaching affiliate in the African American Studies program. He completed his Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism in the Department of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and his postdoctoral work in the Department of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. His interdisciplinary research and teaching focus on African American literature and culture, with an emphasis on literary recovery and archival research. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Conversation, Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, Food and the American Dream and American Literature, and The Journal of Southern History.
Professional Experience
2021-2023 Race, Freedom, and Democratic Citizenship Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of African American Studies, University of South Carolina
2019-2021 Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Research Teaching Scholar/Assistant Professor of English, Pennsylvania Western University
Education
Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2020
M.A., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2012
B.A., Pennsylvania Western University, 2010
Research
“Loving My Soul: African American Foodways and the American Dream.” Food and the American Dream in American Literature. Ed. Robert Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein. University of Tennessee Press. Forthcoming
“At the Foot of the Racial Mountain: Pauline Hopkins’s Southern Exodus in Peculiar Sam: or, The Underground Railroad.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures. 2022
“How a Black Writer in 19th-Century America Used Humor to Combat White Supremacy.” The Conversation. 25 February 2022
