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.

His next book, The Racialization of Print: From John Smith to Frederick Douglass, will be published in June 2027 by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. It is now available for pre-order from Amazon and UNC Press. For a 30% discount at UNC Press, use 01SOCIAL30.

Prof. Rezek is also an expert in the literature of the Age of Revolution and has published about Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in the New York Times Book Review.

The author of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 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