David Mitterauer

I am a PhD Candidate in English who specializes in early American literature and early Black writing. My interests revolve around eighteenth-century transatlantic literary discourses, particularly the many ways how romance as a genre or literary mode crisscrosses the Atlantic. My dissertation is on interiority in slave narratives and early Black fiction. That is, I am interested in the inner life which Black writers reveal in their testimonies of enslavement, particularly how we can glimpse specific joys and pleasures (and which they choose to keep private) that sustain them in their struggles for freedom. In my work as a graduate student, I have gained substantial experience in archival work on Black history in southern Ontario.