About

Danielle Christmas is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Endowed Delta Delta Delta Fellow in the Humanities at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her B.A. in English from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago. With affiliations in both Jewish Studies and American Studies, Danielle teaches on a variety of topics including slavery and the Holocaust in American fiction and film, lynching in American literature and culture, and white nationalist culture and gender. She is currently finishing a book, “Plantation Pimps & Nazi Monsters: Labor, Sex, and Madness in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction,” and starting work on “The Literature of Blood & Soil: White Nationalism and a New American Canon.”  These projects have been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as University of North Carolina’s Provost and Institute for the Arts & Humanities.

RECENT & UPCOMING TALKS

“Pop Culture or National Myth?: Slavery and the Holocaust as One American Horror Story,” “Slavery and Its Afterlives” Speakers Series, Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 2019

“From Neo-Confederate Narrative to Heritage Politics,” Cultural Formations of the Alt-Right Symposium, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, September 2019

“Silent Sam’s New Civil War: The Heritage Politics of Neo-Confederate Fiction,” Post45, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, September 2019

Panelist, “Beyond the Headlines: Confederate Monuments, Historical Memory, and Free Speech,” Carolina Public Humanities and Chapel Hill Public Library, North Carolina, August 2017 (Find 8 min. video here: https://youtu.be/T3vWP0Vp80s)

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

“Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Approach.” Forthcoming in Post45: The Journal.

“Silent Sam’s New Civil War: The Heritage Politics of Neo-Confederate Fiction.” Forthcoming in Reading Confederate Monuments. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press.

“From Heritage Politics to Hate: Neo-Confederate Novels & White Protectionism.” Forthcoming in Building an Architecture of Peace in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

WHAT’S NEW? RESEARCH EDITION:

For a half-hour of me “Examining the Literature of Hate,” check out my podcast interview with the folks at the UNC Institute for the Arts & Humanities, released on September 9, 2019.

WHAT’S NEW? TEACHER’S EDITION:

Students in my English course, “The God(s) of Slavery: Religious Experience in Early African-American Literature,” were asked to inhabit the character of a nineteenth-century preacher and deliver an original sermon on the subject of slavery. They were randomly assigned different roles, ranging from a white slaveholder speaking to fellow whites, a former slave preaching to an abolitionist audience, an enslaved preacher edifying her plantation companions, and everything in between.

Seven of my students were gracious enough to allow me to post videos of their sermons to YouTube. Please check them out; they’re informative and hugely entertaining!