Faculty Bios

Alan Drew is the author of the literary thrillers, The Recruit (Random House, 2022) and Shadow Man (Random House, 2017), which the Wall Street Journal named as one of the ten best mysteries of 2017. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Gardens of Water (Random House, 2008), was translated into a dozen languages and published in nearly two-dozen countries. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. Drew is a professor of English at Villanova University where he directs the creative writing program and the literary festival. He lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children. Learn more about his books at www.alan-drew.com .

I teach, research, and write on post-1945 and contemporary U.S. literature with an emphasis on Asian American literature and history, coming from a framework of critical race & ethnic studies. I'm currently working on a book titled  Someone Else's War: Race, Empire, and the Korean War in American Literature.  The Korean War, long considered the “forgotten war” of twentieth-century U.S. history, has been the subject of a newfound wave of interest in American culture over the past decade. In my book project, I read contemporary American literary works, including novels by Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Ha Jin, to trace the transformative effects of the Korean War and U.S. militarism in Asia on U.S. racial formations from midcentury to the present. Examining the war’s impact on policies and practices around desegregation and immigration, I argue that the Korean War heralded a new mode of liberal inclusion for racial minorities in the United States. Thr...

I teach 19th and 20th century African American literature, including fugitive slave narratives, contemporary novels of slavery, works of the Harlem Renaissance, the African American short story and the works of Toni Morrison and August Wilson. (I am pictured standing in front of August Wilson’s childhood home in Pittsburgh, PA!!) While my teaching range is somewhat broad, my research interests are focused on the narrative and cultural productions of black women preachers. In 2016, I published a critical edition of the autobiography of the Rev. Mrs. Charlotte Riley, an AME preacher born into South Carolina slavery: A Mysterious Life and Calling . My current book project, On the Threshing Floor: Representations of African American Women’s Piety , traces the image of the pious black woman, whom I define as dedicated to enacting and promoting the tenets of Protestant Christianity, as both an historical and a cultural figure from her appearance in autobiographical and expository writing...

My teaching and writing focus on creative nonfiction, editing and publishing, translation, and adaptation. My work has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Inprint, Kimbilio, and Hedgebrook. My short stories and essays can be found in   Callaloo ,   Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism ,   Copper Nickel ,   The Common , and elsewhere. Current projects include   Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets , a co-edited poetry anthology through Wesleyan University Press, and a novel. 

I research and teach courses in literatures of the Americas to 1900, with an emphasis on the long eighteenth century. Within this capacious field, I focus on the intersection of Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies, paying attention to how creators and communities appear in and mark written texts. I am currently at work on a monograph entitled, “The Care that Remains: Returning Ancestral Narratives in the Early Atlantic.” While the awful thefts of Indigenous ancestral remains in the nineteenth century have received important attention, this project turns to the narrative pre-history of such violations, tracing how settlers used texts like natural histories to erase Indigenous ancestral remains’ connection to place and kin. Simultaneously, I examine how these very texts continue to register descendants always caring for their ancestors, and moreover, how Indigenous writers use literature as a crucial space to care for ancestors up through the present day.  I am a co-creat...