Welcome!

I am an assistant professor of English at Lincoln University of Missouri, currently completing my doctorate of English in premodern critical race studies at Texas A&M University. Broadly, my specialties include Black studies, Shakespearean studies, and adaptations studies. 

My dissertation project, “‘So base a hue? A beauteous blossom, sure’: Race and Identity in Shakespearean Performance from the Early Modern to the Postmodern" examines African diasporic adaptations of Shakespeare as articulations of the Black experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. I read these Black Shakespearean afterlives, or “Blackspeares," through what I call the genre-race paradigm. Through the synthesis of philosophical blackness and the racial matrix, different creative genres such as drama, film, and novels produce different constructions of racial Blackness.

My research proposes that under the genre-race paradigm, storytelling becomes a tool by which Black artist-philosophers manipulate Shakespeare in order to provide access to philosophical Blackness for their audiences. The genre-race paradigm is predicated on a collaborative spirit, using the intimacy (or lack thereof) constructed between text and reader/viewer for the audience to, even if only momentarily, obtain philosophical Blackness. 

For inquiries related to my research or further questions about my work, please contact me at bowlingh@lincolnu.edu.