Matthew Teutsch

Matthew Teutsch is an Associate Professor of English at Piedmont University. He received his doctorate from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has held teaching positions at Auburn University of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and he was a Fulbright Scholar in American culture and literature at the University of Bergen in Norway. He has published articles and book reviews in various venues including LEAR, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, African American Review and Callaloo. His research focus is African American, Southern, and Nineteenth Century American literature. He is the editor of Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays (UPM 2020), and his current projects include an editied collection tentatively entitled Jim Crow and the Holocaust in Comics and a project that examines Christopher Priest's run on Black Panther.

The project

Title: La longue durée: Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and Decolonization

"La longue durée seeks to expand upon Michael Rothberg’s work on 'multidirectional memory' through its examination of the United States in relation to both the Holocaust and decolonization. It seeks to unearth the spots of memory that we have subsumed, specifically in the United States, and to illuminate the ways that we remember, or fail to remember, these spots and how they impact us in the present. Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd, writing about the genocide of Indigenous individuals in the United States, points out that we need to excavate these memories because 'while the twentieth-century genocides external to the American continent are avowed, those genocides intrinsic to the American economic and territorial expansion–slavery and the removal and 'reservation' of American Indians–remain an essential abjection at the heart of American identities'. The excavation that this project proposes will help us, in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, understand our interconnected histories and to face those histories head on, in order to combat the current rise in fascism across the globe. During my fellowship, and working with the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines (CHCSC), I envision offering training for educators on how to create pedagogical materials that explore the intersections between Jim Crow, colonialism, and the Holocaust."

Hosting Institution: Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Selective Bibliography

• "'Sweet Christmas': Luke Cage and Pulp Authenticity". Hip-Hop and Comics. Eds. Sheena Howard, Brea Heidelberg, and Justin Burton. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. pp. 91-109. 
• "'The unjust spirit of caste' in Charles W. Chesnutt's and George Washington Cable's New Orleans Novels". Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans’s Literary History. Eds. Leslie Petty and Nancy Dixon. University Press of Mississippi, 2025. 90-104.
• "Christian Nationalism and the Comic, Incognegro". Illmatic Consequences: The Clapback to Opponents of "Critical Race Theory". Eds. Walter Greason and Danian Darrell Jerry. Universal Write Publications, 2022. 181-186.
• "Comics in the U.S. South (Spotlight: Nate Powell)". The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South. Eds. Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, and Monica Carol Miller. Routledge, 2023. pp. 291-294.
• "'They got. . .': Ernest J. Gaines’s Semiotic Reversal of William Faulkner". Mississippi Quarterly, 75.4 (Fall 2022): 437-452.