College of Liberal Arts

Bill Mullen

Professor, Department of English and Director of American Studies

Bill comes to Purdue from the University of Texas-San Antonio, where he was the Graduate Advisor to the Ph.D. Program in English. Prior to working at UTSA he was associate professor of English at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he helped to develop the Center for Working-Class Studies. He has also been a visiting lecturer at Bryn Mawr College and a Fulbright Scholar at Wuhan University in the People’s Republic of China.

Bill’s work in American Studies is shaped by the contest and struggles of people inside and outside the academy for cultural autonomy and social justice. His scholarship explores ways in which citizens of local and international communities imagine and build alternative worlds. He has written Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946 (University of Illinois Press). The book examines the way African American cultural workers on Chicago’s Southside during the 1930s and 1940s built a “cultural front” in conjunction with labor unions, community organizations and the U.S. Communist Party. His second book, Afro-Orientalism (University of Minnesota Press) explores the way writers and cultural workers of African and Asian descent have forged coalitions to undo the legacy of Orientalism both within the U.S. and outside its borders.

Bill has also edited several books exploring the relationship between literature and social movements. These include Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture (with Sherry Lee Linkon), and Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literatures of the United States (with James Smethurst). In 2005 he co-edited with Cathryn Watson W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (University Press of Mississippi), a collection of Du Bois’s essays, journalism and reflections on Asia. He has published essays in African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies and Critique. His public writing has appeared in Against the Current, the Chicago Tribune, the San Antonio Express-News and San Antonio Current. Bill is also co-editor, with Amy Lang, of Class : Culture, a new book series dedicated to innovative, interdisciplinary work on social class and culture.

Bill teaches American Studies seminars and both graduate and undergraduate courses in English at Purdue. His courses underscore the complex interplay of race, gender, class and sexuality using both literary and non-literary texts, including film and music. He has taught seminars on Toni Morrison, Whiteness Studies, American Film, Literature and Culture of the 1930s, Jazz, Blues and American Literature, The Harlem Renaissance and the Politics of Diaspora, Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies. His courses emphasize student participation in knowledge-making and collaborative learning.

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