Dr. Richard Purcell is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair and Associate Professor of English. He is also the Director of the interdisciplinary minor in Cinema Studies.
Research Interests
Dr. Purcell has expertise in film and media, with a particular interest in Black literature, poetry, music and other forms of Black performance and visual art. His secondary areas of interest are aesthetic theory, media and sound studies, critical theory and Black studies.
His first book Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture, explored how race, and particularly the debate over "the Negro Problem" in American literature, functioned generatively for US State anticommunist ideology and global hegemony yet also allowed for counter hegemonic democratic ideas to emerge from Black writers during the cultural Cold War. He also co-edited and contributed to books about Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father and the intersections of music, technology, and culture. His writing and research have appeared in CLS, Jump Cut, ALH, boundary 2, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books and other places.
He is currently pursing two interconnected book projects. The first investigates the intertwined histories of independent/experimental cinema and graffiti writing culture in New York City to talk about public art and the legacies of radical politics, the cultural and political economies of "watching", the rise of corporate telecommunications networks and the surveillance state during the Long Seventies. The other investigates how the social and economic discourses of market liberalization influenced the way black musicians, novelists and performances artists think about the ontological status of the "work" of art as well as their own status as art workers from the late-1980s into the Great Recession.
Biography
Dr. Richard Purcell earned his B.A. in English Literature from Rutgers University (1996); M.A. in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh (1999), and Ph.D. in Cultural and Critical Studies from the University of Pittsburgh (2008). He was a faculty member in English at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the Department of English at the University of Mississippi in 2022.
Courses Taught
- Eng 224 Survey of American Lit Since Civil War
- Eng 310 Introduction to Cinema Studies
- Eng 493 Special Topics in Race and Ethnicity
- Eng 766 Studies in Contemporary American Literature
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Pittsburgh Main Campus (2008)