Associate Professor of English

[Contact Me]

Amherst College : Department of English
P.O. Box 5000 : Amherst, MA 01002
mparham [at] amherst [dot] edu

Click here to see my CV
[Summer 09]

Education
PhD – Columbia University : English and Comparative Literature
M.Phil., M.A. – Columbia University : English and Comparative Literature
B.A. – Washington University : English, Political Science

Research
My research follows a trajectory similar to my teaching, using a blend of literary analysis and cultural studies to write and to produce media texts on a diverse range of topics, mainly in relation to minority life in the twentieth century.

Teaching
I have been at Amherst College since 2001, and in winter 2008 was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of English. Before that I taught for several years at Hunter College, and also taught high school students through Upward Bound (at Columbia’s Double Discovery Center).

I teach classes in African-American literary and cultural studies, modern American popular culture, and also Anglophone literatures after colonialism. I generally teach in one of two modes, either working to train students to reconcile social and historical concerns with literary hermeneutics, or helping them to think across and also to produce across different kinds of media. In both kinds of classes I emphasize close attention to textual nuance and the development of clear, concise argumentation. This is as true for “paper” classes as it is for work with new media.

Some Recent Awards and Honors

• Senior Sabbatical Fellowship, Amherst College (AY 2009-2010)
• Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University
• Miner Crary Sabbatical Research Fellowship, Amherst College
• Mellon-Mays Predoctoral Grants
• Woodrow Wilson Travel & Research Grants
• Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship, Columbia University
• magna cum laude, Washington University