Brent Hayes Edwards

Biography

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He serves as the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

His scholarship and teaching focus on African diasporic literature, theories of the archive, cultural politics in Harlem and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Surrealism, experimental poetics, translation studies and jazz.

His first book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003)—winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies—explores the networks of correspondence and debate among artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance and their Francophone African and Caribbean counterparts in Paris during the interwar period.

Other notable books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017); and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003) as well as scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad and Claude McKay. For his translation of Phantom Africa (Michel Leiris’ monumental 1934 classic of French anthropology) (Seagull Books, 2017), he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.

He has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo and Transition and is the editor of the journal PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association (2021–present).

A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Edwards was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also one of the inaugural Ford Foundation Scholars in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022–2023).

He earned a BA in literature from Yale University (1990) and a PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (1998).

Born in 1968 in Highland Park, Illinois, Edwards lives and works in New York.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023