NCID-1150
Magdalena Zaborowska
Professor, Department of American Culture, Professor of American Culture and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Education/Degree:
1 English (University of Oregon)
About
Magdalena J. Zaborowska has been at the University of Michigan since 2001, and 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. Books: Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), the MLA award-winning: 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), and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004). In addition to numerous articles and chapters published in the United States and Europe, her current book projects include a biography of James Baldwin, Being Better than the World (Yale UP) and a monograph on the proliferation of US-inflected notions of race and sexuality in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, Memory Wars: Race, Museums, and the New Borderlands.
Current Work
Zaborowska's digital humanities project, "Archiving James Baldwin's House in France," concerns a virtual writer's house-museum for James Baldwin (1924-87) - the Civil Rights Movement activist, black queer intellectual who lived internationally, and one of the most important twentieth-century American writers. Limited access to his papers, no authorial sites in the United States, and scarcity of archival material make him hard to study and teach, while recent resurgence of interest in his life and oeuvre add to the timeliness of this project. A digital companion to her new book, Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), "Archiving" focuses on documenting and making accessible to students, researchers, and fans Baldwin's last home residence, "Chez Baldwin," in St. Paul-de-Vence in southern France, where he spent his last sixteen years and where he created his most enduring household. She investigated and documented the structure in 2000, when the house was still filled with the writer's possessions, and returned there in 2014, after it had been lost to developers, just before its partial demolition. Invited to study an archive of objects salvaged from the house by a Baldwin family friend, she has followed Toni Morrison's approach to writing as "literary archeology," where memory, imagination, and language create continuities in black lives past and present.
The project has now yielded an open-access digital collection at the University of Michigan, and an online exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture/Smithsonian, "Chez Baldwin." Her students' work has been published through ArcGIS/StoryMaps.
Research Area Keyword(s)
African American and American Studies, Black Queer Studies, feminist theory, Literary and cultural studies, Transnationalism