'I am striving to encourage and support the study and love of African American literature’

University of Kansas faculty are striving to advance knowledge, interpret our world, solve problems, spark innovation, create beauty and catalyze imagination through their research, scholarship and creative activity. Through the “I Am Striving” series, we’ll learn more about what inspires KU researchers, as well as the goals and impact of their work. 

Q&A with Ayesha Hardison, associate professor of English and director of the History of Black Writing

Explain your research as you would explain it to someone outside your field, such as your grandparents. 

I study African American literature and culture and primarily for my research, this means I study novels, I think about the imagery in the novel, I think about when it was published and what does that means. How is reflected a historical moment, as well as really paying attention to the language, how ideas are conveyed, how they're expressed, and how that contributes to our understanding of the novels overall message. The other aspects of what I study includes other kinds of fiction, as well as film, music, and art. So I'm thinking about texts broadly. I have a particular interest in Black woman's writing, as well as the way that history is conveyed or represented in different kinds of text.

What does your research look like? What methods do you use? 

My research really means reading a lot of different kinds of texts, but also analyzing so that I am paying attention to the various parts that make up a text, the characters, the setting. And thinking about what meaning I can derive for that, not only in relationship to the world of a novel, for example, but also broader ideas outside of the text. What it means about identity or what that means about family or what that means about politics. So that's how I approach my research. In addition, I'm also a literary history scholar. So I am the kind of literature professor that loves to go to archives, I love to look at people's papers, the letters that they're writing, the unpublished manuscripts that they produce, and to think about how that contributes to their identities as a writer. What it means for their career, and to better provide context for my understanding of the work that they produce.

What inspires your research? Why are you passionate about this work? 

I would say the inspiration for my research is my mother. I grew up reading, and that's because my mother loved to read. And she taught me to love to read. And so my research is inspired by how I can create a career based on what I love. So I'm very passionate about reading and what I learned through reading about other locations or different people, or just the way that reading challenged me to think differently. And so that's why I do what I do. I love learning through the process of reading on what I gather or introduced to by reading novels, and then talking about that with other people to learn what they learn and to expand my own knowledge.

How does your research directly impact your field, society, Kansas and the world? 

I think I see the impact of my work in the field, in Kansas and society, the world broadly, similarly to the impact that it has on me. I think literary studies or literary research very much impacts the way that we understand how people relate to each other. I think it stimulates the imagination. It helps us gain interpretive skills to understand what we're receiving, but also to help us gain critical insight about the world in which we live in. So, for me, that speaks broadly to the power of the humanities in general, and the impact that it has on how we imagined community how we imagine our place in society and our place in the world.

What is a recent study/example of work you’d like to share? 

Recently, I co-edited an anthology with a colleague named Eve Dunbar that focuses on the 1930s. That collection is designed to rethink how we approach literary production in the 1930s. Obviously, we all know about the Depression and how devastating that was for people across the country. But the volume really highlights the ways in which African American writers and artists are still producing novels, fiction, poetry, memoirs, etc. That's the importance of the work — the content of it — to rethink the 1930s in the larger tradition of African American writing. But it's also an example of how I work, which sometimes is through collaboration with someone else, or the contributors who wrote chapters for that project. And that's what I really appreciate about my work is being in conversation or dialogue with other scholars and an anthology is one way to do that.

What do you hope are some of the outcomes of your research and work? 

What I hope people gain from my research is a greater appreciation of African American literature and culture. More reading more discussing, I would love that to be an outcome. And just more excitement about the ideas that are being circulated the wonderful art that's produced. And how that is reflective of African American life and being in the United States.