Joseph Rezek is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston University.

He is a scholar who specializes in early and nineteenth-century American literature, the history of the book, early Black Atlantic literature, the Age of Revolution, and the history of race and racism. In his work, Prof. Rezek tells new stories about the relationship between the technology of print and the literature, history, and culture of the Anglophone world, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The book he is currently finishing, The Racialization of Print (forthcoming with the Omohundro Institute and UNC Press), was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities for the 2024-2025 academic year. He is also the author of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Prof. Rezek recently published an essay in the New York Times Book Review about the 250th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. His work has appeared in such publications as Early American Studies, Early American Literature, American Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and CNN Opinion, in addition to many edited volumes and collections. His scholarship has been funded by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Huntington Library.

He lives with his husband and their two children in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Photo Credit: Jackie Ricciardi