Jesse W. Schwartz
Jesse W. Schwartz is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing & Literature Major at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. He has held fellowships with the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Osnabrück, Germany, as well as at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of his interests include radical American history and literature, periodical studies, Marxism, critical race and ethnic studies, and Russian-American relations. His current project traces American cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersection of racialization and radical politics, with a particular focus on representations of the Bolshevik Revolution within US print cultures. A member of the editorial board of Radical Teacher, his work can be found there as well as in Nineteenth-Century Literature and English Language Notes. He is also currently co-editing an essay collection on new directions in print culture studies forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.
Collected Work
“Afrofuturism: Race, Erasure, and COVID”
An introduction to an issue of Radical Teacher co-edited by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Jesse Schwartz on teaching Afrofuturism during a global pandemic. It serves in part as an acknowledgement of the radical transformations taking place within distinct kinds of classrooms, not simply those located within the walls of academia.
“‘Dynamite Talk’: William Dean Howells, Racial Socialism, and a Legal Theory of Literary Complicity”
This essay returns to the transcript of the Haymarket trial in order to identify the catalyst behind William Dean Howells’s unlikely conversion from hidebound “Dean of American Letters” into an ardent—if provisional—activist. By linking the defendants’ tracts and speeches with subsequent political acts allegedly committed by their sympathizers, the prosecution had manufactured a juridical reconciliation that successfully collapsed all conceptual space between word and deed, thereby leaving every writer potentially liable for the social lives of their texts.