Sara Wood did her first degree at Nottingham Trent University and her M.Phil and PhD at the University of Birmingham. She has taught a range of courses in American literature and culture and was appointed to the University of Birmingham in 2007. Her chief research areas are twentieth-century African American visual art and literature.

Current Research

African American Visual Art
My PhD engaged in an in-depth study of the critically neglected terrain of African American visual art between 1945 and 1970. I explored an influential trend that developed within African American visual culture in this period, which sought to move beyond the binary of socially engaged or aesthetically challenging art. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, I studied a range of diverse texts including a museum exhibition, Abstract Expressionist painting, photography and Ralph Ellison’s literary trope of ‘invisibility’. I am currently developing research from my thesis, entitled Shadow and Act: Race and Representation in African American Art, for publication.

My research focuses upon the interaction between aesthetic experimentation and issues of representation in the work of African American artists. I am particularly interested in the way that artists engaged in formal and stylistic experiments whilst negotiating with the demands placed on them as ‘black artists’. I trace the ways in which artists such as Norman Lewis and Roy DeCarava reconfigure the boundaries of aesthetic modes whilst developing new and increasingly complex ways to envision black experience within this matrix of concerns. I am currently completing an article on the controversial museum exhibition, Harlem on My Mind which was staged at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1969.

I am planning a larger project which seeks to explore the crosscurrents between twentieth-century American literature and visual art.

Current Teaching

• The Thriller: Fiction, Film and Theory
  
• Contemporary American Fiction
  
• Foundations of American Literature to 1890

Postgraduate Supervision

I would be happy to supervise students interested in any of the topics above, particularly twentieth-century American literature and African American visual art.

Recent Publications

(Forthcoming) ‘Pure Eye Music: Norman Lewis, Abstract Expressionism and Bebop in The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Arts (Oxford University Press, 2008)

“An urge to make music of invisibility”: Ralph Ellison’s fiction, 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies (Issue 9, Spring, 2002)