Mason Stokes

Professor

B.A., University of South Carolina
M.A. and Ph.D., University of Virginia

Office: Palamountain 308
Phone: (518) 580-5184
Email: mstokes@skidmore.edu

Teaching and Research Interests:

• African-American Literature and Culture
• Queer Literature and Theory
• American Literature, Civil War to the present
• Theories of Race and Ethnicity
• History and Theory of Sexuality

Courses Taught:

• EN 105: "Race," Writing, and Difference
• EN 110: Introduction to Literary Studies
• EN 226: Introduction to American Literature
• EN 227: Introduction to African-American Literature
• EN 324: American Fictions
• EN 327: Twentieth-Century African-American Novels
• EN 338: Queer Fictions
• EN 363: Thinking Heterosexuality
• EN 375: Narrative and Heterosexuality
• EN 375: Toni Morrison
• SSP 100: Sexualities/Textualities

Selected Publications

Books:

• All the Truth I Can Stand: A Novel, Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers, forthcoming Fall 2024
• Saving Julian: A Novel. Wilde City Press, 2014. (republished in the UK by Pride Publishing)
• The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Articles and Essays:

• “`A Brutal, Indecent Spectacle’: Heterosexuality, Futurity, and Go Tell It on the Mountain.”  Modern Fiction Studies 62:2 (Summer 2016): 292-306.  
• “Don’t Tell Me What’s Best for My Students” [Invited Op-Ed].  The Chronicle of Higher Education (28 Sept. 2015).  Web and Print.
• “`Maybe There’s a Novel There’: On Stalking, Empathy, & Becoming a Scholar-Novelist” [Personal Essay].  Bloom (21 Aug. 2015): n. pag.  Web.
• “Namesake” [Personal Essay]. Colorado Review 42.2 (Summer 2015): 91-107. (Selected for inclusion in Best American Essays 2016)
• "In Defense of Trigger Warnings” [Op-Ed].  The Chronicle of Higher Education (29 May 2014).  Web.
• "There is Heterosexuality: Jessie Fauset, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Problem of Desire."  African American Review 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 67-83. 
•  “Father of the Bride: Du Bois and the Making of Black Heterosexuality.”  Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois.  Ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum.  Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2007.  289-316.
•  “We Are Family: Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days.” Salmagundi 153-154 (Winter-Spring 2007): 175-83. 
•  “White Heterosexuality: A Romance of the Straight Man’s Burden.”  Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality.  Ed. Chris Ingraham.  New York: Routledge, 2005.  131-149.
•  “Say My Name.”  American Literary History 17.1 (2005): 171-182.
•  Rev. of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, by Richard Bruce Nugent.  Callaloo 26.3 (2003): 908-13.
•  “Strange Fruits: Rethinking the Gay Twenties.” Transition12.2 (2002): 56-79.
• “Someone’s in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall,” American Quarterly 50.4 (1998): 718-44.