Eric Lott

Cultural historian Eric Lott is a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Lott has written and lectured widely on the politics of U.S. literature, music, performance, and intellectual life. He received his Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and taught for more than twenty years at the University of Virginia, where he was director of graduate studies in English from 1997 to 2000. He has published dozens of articles, essays, and reviews in books and journals such as the Village Voice, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Social Text, PMLA, Representations, and American Quarterly. His book Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and he is also the author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual(2006) and Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), which won the MLA’s Best First Book Prize, among other awards, and recently appeared in a twentieth-anniversary edition. He is on the editorial board of Criticism, a codirector of the Dartmouth American Studies Institute, and he recently served on the program committee of the American Studies Association.