JJ Butts
- Department Chair of Literature, Language, and Culture
- Professor of English
- Department of Literature, Language, and Culture
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Biography
As an English professor, I enjoy teaching a wide variety of courses in American literature, culture, and film, including courses in African American literature, various ethnic American literatures, and women鈥檚 literature. In addition to literary history and theory, my classes draw on insights from anthropology, history, geography, urban studies, and political philosophy, and my students explore how imaginative texts explore a wide range of ideas and phenomena: how settler colonialism shaped the U.S., ideas of justice (and vengeance), competing understandings of leadership and citizenship, our optimistic听and pessimistic visions of the future…
I was raised in Southern Appalachia, where class and race tensions echo听in songs and names of places, but I鈥檝e lived in mid-sized and large cities my entire adult life, and I鈥檓 at home on a mountaintop or a busy sidewalk. I have long been fascinated by how inequity is written into our natural and built environments and how precarity is revealed in moments of crisis, and my research reflects these interests. I have published articles on depictions of public housing in New Deal guidebooks, on urban collective novels, on Ralph Ellison’s reimagination of liberal citizenship, and on African American documentary texts in the 1940s. My book听Dark Mirror: African American Literature and the Federal Writers鈥櫶齈roject听(Ohio State听UP, 2021)听highlights narratives of pluralism and modernization in the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) documentary texts and in the literary responses to these narratives by Black writers. I am currently working on projects exploring unpublished FWP documentary studies of African American culture and the representation of 20th-century urban uprisings in literature.
When I鈥檓 not teaching or researching, I enjoy spending time with my family, hiking and biking, and exploring Des Moines鈥檚 vibrant cultural scene. A听long-time music fan, I play a number of string instruments, and I’m a guitarist for the eclectic rock group The SO-SOs.
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Education
- B.A. English and Anthropology Appalachian State University, 1995
- M.A. English Syracuse University, 1999
- Ph.D. English, Syracuse University, 2006
