Xavier LeeMellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Xavier Lee is completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University. He received his Bachelors in comparative literature from Swarthmore College in 2017. His project examines questions of self-perception, identity and historical consciousness in novels written by Black authors of the Atlantic World. He is completing  a dissertation which examines the significance of slavery in Black historical literature of the postcolonial epoch (~1960 – present). In it, he uses novels by Black authors like Edouard Glissant, Léonora Miano and Toni Morrison to theorize a set of significance changes in the historical consciousness of slavery in the Black Atlantic World at the close of European colonialism and segregation.

Research Interests

Critical Theory and Philosophy; Cultural History; English and Anglophone Literature; Fiction; Film; Literary Theory; Romance Languages