Sharon Monteith

Role

Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History at Nottingham Trent University.  In 2022,

SNCC's Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (2020) won the C. Hugh Holman Book Award judged by The Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and the American Studies Network Book Prize judged by the European Association of American Studies (EAAS). Published by the University of Georgia in its Print Culture series, it recovers the print and publishing culture of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its activist literary history, notably in writing by Charlie Cobb, Jane Stembridge, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Jean Wheeler Smith, Bill Mahoney, Maria Varela, John O'Neal, James Forman, Gloria House, Worth Long, Peter De Lissovoy,  Gloria Wade Gayles, Julius Lester, Richard Hall,  Kathleen Collins, Jimmy Garrett, Denise Nicholas,  and Mitchell Zimmerman.  She talks about it  here

For Ray Arsenault in Patterns of Prejudice, it is a “fascinating and important new book…  the stories that interest Monteith the most do not appear in previous works of scholarship or memoirs; her stories are the largely forgotten ones imbedded in language and literary invention. […] Taken together, this eclectic body of work propels Monteith down an innovative and imaginative road of discovery. Politics and literature, the personal and the collective: it all merges into a new way of understanding SNCC’s deep commitment to participatory democracy and the cultivation and empowerment of local movements.  […] Monteith skilfully places SNCC’s print culture in the contexts of Black Power, the Black Arts Movement and the rising conscious[1]ness of postcolonial literature and the international African diaspora.”

For Emilye Crosby in the Journal of American Studies, “ In Monteith’s hands, even writing we know, like Howard Zinn’s The New Abolitionists, reveals new insights…. Zinn was among a handful of professional writers, also including journalist Pat Watters, psychologist Robert Coles, and attorney Len Holt, whom Monteith includes in this discussion of SNCC’s narrative culture. All these authors were compelled by SNCC to push against the boundaries of their professional writing in an effort to capture the emotion and complexity of the organization’s story as it unfolded. […] Thanks to SNCC writers and SNCC’s Stories we now know more of what SNCC did and learned and how they survived to carry on the struggle.”

For Steve Estes in The Sixties, “American Studies researchers and literary scholars will find much to like here... The field reports chapter will be particularly instructive for historians, who have been mining SNCC reports for decades to chronicle the movement on both the national and local levels. Here, Monteith considers the reports as a distinct literary genre that would influence the print culture of other New Left organizations and the underground press of the 1960s. [….]One of the stronger chapters in SNCC’s Stories locates antecedents for the Black Arts Movement in SNCC’s literary culture. Literary lions like Nikki Giovanni and Julius Lester cut their teeth in SNCC before writing incisive critiques of American culture (and the civil rights movement itself) in the late 1960s and 1970s. Monteith shows that SNCC poets like Charlie Cobb were mining Black Power themes before the heyday of the Black Arts Movement. This corrective feeds into a larger historiographical movement in the last few decades that blurs distinctions between civil rights and Black Power.[…]. This book successfully marries deep historical research and thoughtful literary criticism in a way that should inspire and inform future works in the field”

Monteith was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to research the broader US civil rights movement's literary histories. She has supervised 38 PhD students to successful completion and welcomes applications from students who wish to pursue their research in any area of her interest and expertise.

Career overview

Before joining Nottingham Trent University, Monteith was Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and founding co-director, with Zoe Trodd, of the Centre for Research in Race and Rights.

From 2013-2016, she was founding Director of the Midlands3Cities-AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (a consortium comprising University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, De Montfort University, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University and she put in place multiple creative industry partners). Prior to that, she was Associate Dean of the University of Nottingham Graduate School with responsibility for the Faculty of Arts.

For REF 2014, she was a member and assessor for two subject areas in Sub-Panel D: History and English.

External activity

Some examples include:

November 1, 2021 Presentation of SNCC's Stories  at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, Emory University, Atlanta

http://jamesweldonjohnson.emory.edu/home/about/news-events/index.html?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D155399723

November 25, 2021 Contributor to the British Academy's Thinkers in Our time series Thinkers for our time: W.E.B. Du Bois | The British Academy

Freedom Reads  (Summer 2021) at the National Justice Museum organised by Nottingham City of Literature and English PEN

Welcome to the Summer of… | Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature (nottinghamcityofliterature.com)

Professor Monteith’s recent collaborations include:

Nottingham Black Archive for the AHRC World War I Hidden Histories network.

National charity Journey to Justice as city lead to bring its exhibition on US and UK civil rights to the city of Nottingham. The exhibition at the National Justice Museum involved city-wide partnership working with Midlands3Cities, Nottingham City Council, and multiple community and arts organisations, colleges and schools, Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. Alongside the exhibition, local people and university students worked together on human rights initiatives by recovering and reclaiming stories that demonstrate history of rights and justice in Nottingham.

Sponsors and collaborators

Professor Monteith's research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the AHRC, and the British Academy, in the UK and the Rockefeller Foundation and the Centre for the Study of Southern Culture in the US.

She was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow (the only non-US  Fellow) on a 5-year project instituted by Kenneth Goings and Barbara Ellen Smith at the University of Memphis, She researched the Mississippi Delta.

In 2017 she was Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi for The Radical South: Southern Activism, Past and Present.

In 2016 she was the PI for a British Academy Landmark Conference Grant when the BA held its first and only three-day conference. It focused on Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights and brought together civil rights activists, documentary filmmakers, historians and cultural critics in the US and UK. It also involved a public event to commemorate the life of former SNCC activist and Head of the NAACP, Julian Bond.

In 2013, she co-organised a conference devoted to hidden histories of individuals at the March on Washington in 1963, held in Washington DC and reviewed here https://blog.notbemoved.com/post/61912784083/memorials-monuments-and-memory/embed

Professor Nahem Yousaf (NTU) and Professor Monteith co-edit the Manchester University Press series Contemporary American and Canadian Writers which publishes the work of established and emerging scholars to reflect the breadth and diversity of contemporary North American writing.

Publications in this series include David Brauner, Philip Roth (2007); Mark Brown, Paul Auster (2007); Andrew Tate, Douglas Coupland (2008); Sinead Moynihan, Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing (2009); David Stirrup, Louise Erdrich (2010); Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons eds. Mark Z. Danielewski (2011); James Peacock, Jonathan Lethem (2011); Andrew Taylor and Simon Malpas, Thomas Pynchon (2013); Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, Helena Wahlström, Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (2014); Cindy Hamilton, Sarah Paretsky (2015), Rachel Sykes, The Quiet American Novel (2018), Zalfa Feghali, Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice and Contemporary American and Canadian Literature (2019), Lydia Cooper, Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature (2021) Michael Kalisch, The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction. (2021), Rachel Sykes et al, eds. Marilynne Robinson (2022)

Please address emails about proposals for new titles to both editors.