Ernest L. Gibson III

Education

PhD, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

About Me

Ernest L. Gibson III received his PhD in Afro-American studies from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He is the author of Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and has published on James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Scandal. An interdisciplinary scholar by training, his research lies at the intersections of literary, cultural, and queer theories, and often pivots on questions of manhood, masculinity, and vulnerability. He is currently at work on his second book project, tentatively entitled, Dark Penmanship: Afro-Ontology, Resistance, and Freedom.

Research Interests

African American literature and culture; 20th to 21st-century American literature; feminist and queer theory; male studies; Black popular culture, women's and gender studies

Publications

• Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy. (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
• “‘Tangled Skeins’: Scandal’s Olivia Pope and the Counternarrativizing of Black Female Enslavement.” Gladiators in Suits: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Scandal. Eds. Ron. Jackson, Kimberly Moffitt, and Simone Puff (Syracuse University Press, 2019).
• “Trends in James Baldwin Criticism, 2013-2015.” James Baldwin Review4 (2018).
• “‘Digging through the Ruins’: Just Above My Head and the Memory of James A. Baldwin.” James Baldwin: Challenging Authors. Eds. A. Scott Henderson and Paul Thomas. (Sense Publishers, 2014).
• “The Envy of Erudition: Booker T. Washington’s Desire for a Du Boisian Intellectuality.” The Black Scholar 43.2 (2013).
• “‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’: The Wire’s Stringer Bell as a Tragic Intellectual.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present) 10.1 (2011).