Shani Mott

phone: (410) 516-4313  

Shani Mott is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department. Her research interests address strategic deployments of racial language in American popular culture, with an emphasis on the uses of race in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Her book manuscript, "Saving the Soul of the Great Republic: Imagining Race and Writing Democracy," explores how authors of American novels used race as a progressive force in answering complex questions about sexuality, economic inequality, and political power. Mott argues, in particular, that authors writing during the inter- and postwar years of the twentieth century relied on a technique she calls "racial transvestism," wherein black authors wrote novels with predominantly white characters and white authors attempted to write blackness. Such attempts, Mott contends, provided authors with privileges otherwise denied them, be it access to publishing companies, increased readership, or even a fuller acknowledgement of a given author's American citizenship.

Shani Mott holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. She lives with her daughter and husband in Baltimore, MD.