Carla Kaplan

In residence Academic Year 2007-2008

Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature

Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R

Telephone:  617.384.8350

Email: c.kaplan@neu.edu

Biography

Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University where she is developing a Center for the Study of Biography and Cultural History. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and has held teaching appointments in English, African-American Studies, Gender Studies, and American Studies at Yale University and the University of Southern California before moving to Northeastern in fall of 2006. She is the author of The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, which was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, a New York Times “Notable Book” and chosen three times as a “best” book by The New York Times. She is also editor of Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk Tales from the Gulf States, Dark Symphony and Other Works by Elizabeth Laura Adams, a forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing (due in 2007), and a forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the NEH, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Beinecke Library, the Harry Ransom Research Center, and others, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including American Literature, PMLA, and American Quarterly. Her current project, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, a group biography, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

Project

“Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance”

Little could be more unusual in the 1920’s than for white, upper-class women to seek to become, in effect, honorary blacks. Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance identifies and documents an extraordinary group who did just that. A group biography and cultural history, this book focuses on six exemplary figures representing two generations of approximately four dozen white women -- hostesses, patrons, comrades, lovers, writers, mothers, and white women passing for black -- who sought to become Harlem Renaissance insiders. In different ways, all attempted to cross race lines seen as impenetrable by their contemporaries – both white and black. By making themselves socially unintelligible and courting ostracism, they confounded available categories and introduced many of our own critical ideas about the flexibility or “play” of social identity. These women complicated their culture’s notions of identity. Through them, this book historicizes “identity politics&148; and investigates why people invest in both “other” and “their own” identities. Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance is forthcoming from HarperCollins.