Balthazar I. Beckett

Title: 
Lecturer
Biography: 

Balthazar I. Beckett holds a PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. In addition to UC Berkeley, Balthazar has taught writing and literature at the American University in Cairo, San Francisco State University, Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison, the Royal University of Bhutan, as well as Brooklyn and Queens Colleges in New York City, among other universities.

His work has appeared in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North (eds. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, NYU Press, 2019), as well as in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)CallalooSouth Atlantic ReviewAlif: Journal of Comparative PoeticsInternational Journal of Human Rights EducationPoverty and RaceSmall Axe/sxsalonSocial Text OnlineKritikon LitterarumAfrican American National Biography, and Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford University Press), for which he also served as guest editor. He has won awards for his writing, teaching, and research.

Role: 

Selected Publications

“‘Doomed by the Confusion in their Design’: Racialized Urban Space, Redlining, & and Monolithic Whiteness.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US (Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature) 47.1 (2022). 1–26.

“Unfinished Business: The Killing of George Floyd and the Case of African Americans at the United Nations.” International Journal of Human Rights Education, Vol. 5.1 (2021). Special Issue: Black Lives Matter and Human Rights Education. 1-29.

“Redlines and Brownstones: The Jim Crow North in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.” The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South. Eds. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, with Komozi Woodard. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 113-137.

“‘Like a Butterfly on a Pin’: Witnessing Genealogies of Whiteness in James Baldwin’s ‘Going to Meet the Man.’” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 41 (2021). Special Issue: Literature, History, & Historiography. Forthcoming, 2021.

"Why 1964 Cairo Mattered in 1975 Oakland: Intercommunalism, Internationalism, and Reactionary Suicide in David Graham Du Bois’ … And Bid Him Sing." Callaloo 39.4 (2016). 919–935.

"Contagious Bodies and Cosmopolitan Boundaries in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria." South Atlantic Review: The Journal of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association 84.1 (December 2016). Print. 45-65.

Contact

473 Wheeler Hall

Spring 2024 Office Hours

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10-11