Joseph Darda is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University and a Mellon Sawyer Seminar fellow at the University of California, Irvine. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as American Quarterly, American Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. While serving as the managing editor of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, he edited and introduced the special issue “Literary Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism” (2014). He is currently working on a book project, Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War, that traces a cultural history of national defense and racialization––through state documents, novels, films, memorials, and news media––from the formation of the national security state in the late 1940s to the counterterror wars of the twenty-first century.
At TCU, he is a core member of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Program and an affiliate member of the Women and Gender Studies Program. He completed his PhD in 2015 at the University of Connecticut.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and media, critical race and ethnic studies, American cultural studies
