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. His first book, Mechanical Failure: Modernism, Technology, and the Mediation of History, will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2027. He is currently working on a second book project, under contract with Polity’s “Black Lives” series, on the social and political thought of the Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

Pasqualina’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, African American Review, MELUS, J19, The Journal of American Culture and The Mark Twain Annual, among other venues. He has also published public-facing scholarship in  Public Books, Inside Higher Ed and MarkTwainStudies.org. His 2023 essay “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, Pasqualina was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he taught interdisciplinary courses on U.S. history and literature and science, technology, and society in the modern era. He was twice awarded the Excellence in Honors Award for exceptional teaching and mentorship in UNR’s Honors College. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California (USC), where he taught in the Thematic Option Honors Program. He currently co-directs 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.