Professor Afroamerican and African Studies, Professor of American Culture
Surface Mail: 505 S. State Street | 3743 Haven Hall, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045
phone: 734.615.8866
About
Magdalena J. Zaborowska is a professor for the Departments of American Culture & Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has taught and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Tulane University, Aarhus University in Denmark, University of Italy in Cagliari (Sardinia) and Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier in France. In addition to numerous articles and chapters published in the United States and Europe, her current book projects include “Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity” (forthcoming from Duke UP) and a monograph in progress on the proliferation of American notions of race and sexuality in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, Racing Borderlands.
Research and Teaching Fields:
Literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender; African American literature (esp., James Baldwin), immigrant ethnicities, feminist, and critical race theory; post-totalitarian East-Central Europe.
MLA Award-Winning Books:
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP 2009) and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
Edited and Co-Edited Collections
Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism (Aarhus University Press, 1998); The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001); Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004).
Current Projects
Archiving the Invisible House: James Baldwin’s Virtual Writer’s Museum (digital humanities book and collection in progress at the UMDL)
Public Scholarship and Collaborations:
“Chez Baldwin” online exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture/Smithsonian, Washington D.C. (forthcoming spring 2020)
“Borderland Foundation” (culture animation and multicultural Eastern Europe NGO) in Sejny, Poland
The James Baldwin Project
Affiliation(s)
- Facutly: Department of American Culture (AC), African American Studies
- Faculty: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS)
Award(s)
- Professor Zaborowska is the Winner of the 2009 William Sanders Scarborough Prize Award
- 2009-2010 Hunting Family Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities
- Honorable Mention, Errol Hill Award (for outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies) from the American Society for Theater Research for James Baldwin's Turkish Decade
Field(s) of Study
- African American and American literary and cultural studies
