Joseph Lamar Lewis

Born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, Joseph entered Gallatin after earning a BA in English from Hampton University. While here, he concentrated in Africana and literary studies. He worked as an editorial intern at Avalon Publishing Group and at Pure Jazz Magazine, a gallery assistant at Washington Square East Galleries, and as a test preparation instructor at the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation.

Joseph’s thesis, "A Journey to the Top of the Bottom: Discursive Irony and the American Africanist Presence in American Literature," explored how moments of situational irony in 19th- and 20th-century American gothic literature codified individual and national anxieties in American culture. His article “Monsters and Heroes: Black Subjectivity in Stephen Crane’s The Monster and Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground” was published in the 2012 Identités américaines: relations et interactions issue of Anglophonia: The French Journal of English Studies.

In 2008, Joseph was awarded the Peter Boyse Presidential Teaching Fellowship at Delta College in University Center, Michigan, where he was an assistant professor of composition and literature. He is a pursuing his doctoral studies in Department of English at Wayne State University in Detroit.