Research Fields: race, ethnicity, interracialism, migration, multilingualism, and themes and motifs in literature of the United States and of Europe

Education: PhD Freie Universität Berlin (1975)

Selected Works: The Temptation of Despair (April 2014). With Greil Marcus he has coedited New Literary History of America (2009). Ethnic Modernism (2008), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997), and Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986). Edited works include An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (2003), Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (2000), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America (1998), Theories of Ethnicity (1996), and Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1993), and The Return of Thematic Criticism (1993).