Lloyd Pratt

Professor Lloyd Pratt taught at Harvard, Yale, and Michigan State University before coming to Oxford. He was appointed Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature in 2016 and is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Rothermere American Institute.

Professor Pratt's research interests and postgraduate research supervision areas span: American literature, African American literature, literatures of the American South, the novel, theory and criticism, gender and sexuality, history of the book, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in English. His 2016 work The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature examined how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. He is currently at work on three books: a study of reading in Emerson's America, a series of essays on locality in the American South, and a popular historical account of an early twentieth-century woman reader in the American South.