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

• “Travel and Imagination in Black Letters,” With Good Reason, Virginia Humanities and NPR, 7/3/2022
• “Interview with Michael Ra-shon Hall,” Black Authors Matter TV, National Black Book Festival, 4/19/2022
• “Professor's New Book Explores African American Travel and Imagination,” VCU News, 3/25/2022
• “Freedom Beyond Confinement: interview with Michael Ra-shon Hall,” Liverpool University Press blog, 1/17/2022