Our Faculty

Background

Joseph Keith’s research and teaching interests include 20th-century and contemporary American literature and culture; cultures of U.S. Empire; comparative race and ethnic studies; postcolonial studies; global Cold War studies; Anglophone Caribbean literature; and environmental humanities. He is the author of Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (2019). His work has appeared in the American Quarterly, Interventions, Postmodern Culture, the Cambridge Companion to the Novel, the Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, and Archipelagic American Studies (Duke UP, 2019), among other journals and anthologies.

His current project, America’s Archipelago: Islands and the Aberrant Geographies of Empire, examines writers from the Caribbean and the Pacific for whom the figure of the island becomes an imaginative and geo-historical challenge to the U.S. as a nation, as a republic, and as an empire. The project focuses on specific islands (e.g., the Philippines, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Guantánamo) as liminal spaces situated not only at the geographical but also the legal and ideological limits of the nation-state. Unhinged from the nation, these islands—both inside and outside the nation—bear witness on one hand to the uneven incorporation of racialized subjects into the “mainland” of American citizenship. At the same time, they become social and textual spaces within which various writers recount untold stories of the U.S. and imagine new communities that extend beyond the nation’s perimeters. The project seeks to overturn the customary narrative in which the United States acts upon and dominates the islands of the colonial world, instead depicting these islands pressing against the continent. It remaps the U.S. across an archipelago empire and, in the process, resituates the nation within a critical global frame that challenges the unconscious spatial frameworks that govern the way we perceive the world.

Select Publications

Books

Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2013).

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (University of Iowa Press, 2019). Co-editor with Steven Belletto.

Articles

“Thinking Small: Islands and the Imperial Logics of Scale.” The American Quarterly Volume 77, Number 3 (September 2025): 409-432.

“The Structure of Nuclear and Environmental Violence: The Marshall Islands, The Runit Dome and the Long Durée of Radioactive Occupation.” (forthcoming) Handbook of Structural Violence. Eds. Alexandra Moore and Joshua Price. DeGruyter Press.

“Richard Wright and Postcolonial Theory.” Richard Wright in Context. Ed. Michael Nowlin. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“The Novel as Planetary Form.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel. Ed. Eric Bulson. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 268-282.

“Invisible Islands: Remapping the Trans-Pacific Archipelago of U.S. Empire in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart.” Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture. Eds. Michele Stephens and Brian Roberts. Duke University Press, 2017. 178-202.

“Keeping Secrets: Richard Wright, The Cold War and the Epistemology of Un-Belonging.” Richard Wright Writing America at Home and from Abroad. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 74-92.

“Comparative Race Studies and Interracialisms.” Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature. Eds. Crystal Parikh and Daniel Kim. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 183-197.

Education

• PhD, Columbia University
• MPhil, Columbia University
• MA, The Johns Hopkins University
• BA, Hampshire College

Research Interests

• 20th-Century and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
• Cultures of U.S. Empire
• Postcolonial Studies
• Global Cold War Studies
• Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
• Anglophone Caribbean Literature
• Environmental Humanities

Awards

• Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities Fellowship