Eric Gardner
Professor of English
B.A., Illinois Wesleyan University, 1989
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996
Eric Gardner teaches a wide range of courses centering on American literature/culture and methods for literary study. His research focuses on nineteenth-century African American writers and activists and has been recognized with an NEH Summer Stipend (2005), a Braun Fellowship (2008-2010), and SVSU's Warrick Award for Research Excellence (2010). His book Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) won the 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize. He has also edited three volumes: Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery (2005), Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (2007), and, with John Ernest, a new edition of J. McHenry Jones's 1896 novel Hearts of Gold (2010). His shorter work has appeared in journals like PMLA, New England Quarterly, Legacy, and African American Review. He is a life member of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society, and the Pauline E. Hopkins Society. For more information, see his SVSU webpage at < www.svsu.edu/~gardner/ >.
Dr. Gardner has been active in campus life since coming to SVSU in 1996, and he served as SVSU's English Department Chair from 2006 to 2010. When not teaching, talking with students and colleagues, writing, staring at microfilm, or visiting dusty archives, he loves to read and spend time with his family.
The five books Eric would want with him if marooned on a deserted island: At the moment, the five books he'd want on a desert island would probably be Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, and the Oxford English Dictionary-though he remembers enough of The Twilight Zone to hope his spectacles survive whatever might cause him to be thus marooned.