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.
