Recently arrived from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Michelle Gordon specializes in American literature and African American Studies, with an emphasis on literary radicalism, intellectual history, black women's studies, and urban cultural studies in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century US. Secondary specialties include Caribbean literature and culture, multi-cultural American writing, black American music, and popular culture. Currently, Professor Gordon teaches courses in American literature, black slave and neo-slave narrative traditions, and the intersections among US literature, national mythologies, and popular culture. Professor Gordon's book manuscript, "Bringing Down Babylon: The Chicago Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and African American Freedom Struggles, 1931-1969," offers a local literary history of black Chicago's two most vibrant literary movements, the Chicago Renaissance (1935-1953) and the local Black Arts Movement (1965-1975). The project explores these explicitly radical movements' relationships to each other, and to the contemporaneous grassroots freedom struggles with which Chicago's black writers directly engaged. "Bringing Down Babylon" resituates the cultural work and activism of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, Theodore Ward, and Haki Madhubuti, exploring their grassroots and aesthetic work amidst artistic, political, and intellectual networks within Chicago, across the nation, and within the African Diaspora. Professor Gordon's most recent article, "'Somewhat Like War': The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun," is forthcoming in a special issue of African American Review.