Free Reading

Lloyd Pratt will deliver his inaugural lecture as Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature.

Before coming to Oxford, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Michigan State University. He was appointed Drue Heinz Professor in 2016. Lloyd Pratt's research interests 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.