Stephen Pasqualina

Degrees

• Ph.D., University of Southern California
• M.A., St. John's University
• B.A., St. John’s University

Biography

Stephen Pasqualina’s research and teaching interests include modernist literature and visual culture, transnational American studies, Black studies and critical theory. He is currently working on two book projects: one on early twentieth-century visualizations of U.S. empire and the other on the political and social thought of the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Pasqualina’s scholarship has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Modernism/modernity, MELUS, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, The Journal of American Culture and The Mark Twain Annual. His writing has also appeared at Public Books, Inside Higher Ed and MarkTwainStudies.org. His 2023 essay titled “Before the Ship and the Plantation: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and Blackness as Totality” received an Honorable Mention for the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize in American Literature.

Prior to arriving at University of Detroit Mercy in 2022, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he taught courses in American studies and science, technology, and society in the modern era, twice receiving the Excellence in Honors Award for teaching and mentorship in the Honors College. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, where he taught in the Thematic Option Honors Program. He is currently the director of the University Honors Program at UDM. His research has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.