Kevin Bell

Areas of Specialization

American Literature After 1900

New York University, Ph.D (Comparative Literature) 2000

The point of departure for Kevin Bell's work is the study of philosophical aesthetics, as framed by particular moments in a conceptual and geographic (dis)continuum traversing German Idealism, Afro-diasporic radical traditions in art, critique and political thought, and (post) Debordian spectacular analysis of everyday consumption and creativity. His documented research crosses a number of disciplinary zones, particularly trans-Atlantic literary modernisms; Black American music, literature and film; deconstructive aesthetic and cultural theory; and explorative traditions in filmmaking. He is the author of Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He is working now on an interpretive study entitled Drift Velocities: the Aesthetic Curvature of Radical Black Film and Literature.

African American Literature and Language

Theory and Cultural Studies