Michael Ra-shon Hall

Michael Ra-shon Hall, PhD

Assistant Professor

(804) 827-8432

Hibbs Hall, 900 Park Ave., room 432

20th/21st Century

Literatures of Diversity

Education

  • PhD, Emory University
  • MPS, Cornell University
  • BA, Southeastern Louisiana University

Research Interests

  • 20th Century and Contemporary African American literature
  • Travel, tourism, and mobility
  • Cultural histories of travel and leisure
  • Speculative fiction
  • Narrative and visual culture 

Select Publications

  • “Hall, Michael Ra-shon. Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination In African American Cultural History and Letters. Clemson University Press, 2022.
  • Hall, Michael Ra-shon, rev. of William Merrill Decker’s Geographies of Flight: Phyllis Wheatley to Octavia Butler (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), MELUS; Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, in press 
  • “Scenes of Black Masculinity and Wanderlust: Gendered Mobility and Film Diaspora in Emperor Jones.” Motion Pictures: Travel Ideals in Film. Ed. Andrew McGregor and Emma Blackwood. Switzerland: Peter Lang Publishers, 2016, 151-165. 
  • “The Negro Traveller’s Guide to a Jim Crow South: Negotiating Racialized Landscapes During a Dark Period in US Cultural History, 1936-1967,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 17, Iss. 3 (2015), 307-319. 
  • “Dramatizing the African American Experience of Travel in the Jim Crow South: The Negro Motorist Green Book in the African American Literary Imagination,” South Carolina Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2014), 80–94

Affiliations

  • Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
  • Modern Language Association
  • Collegium for African American Research
  • National Council for Black Studies

Courses

  • ENGL 215: Textual Analysis
  • ENGL 301: Introduction to the English Major
  • ENGL 382: African American Literature from Realism to the Present
  • ENGL 383: Short Fiction
  • ENGL 499: Senior Seminar

Awards

  • Residential Fellowship, VCU Humanities Research Center, Spring 2022
  • Seed Grant, College of Humanities and Sciences, VCU, 2021
  • Faculty Success Program, National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, Award funded by VCU Office of the Provost, Spring 2020

Links