Rich Blint - “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on American Cinema”

Rich Blint is the 2016-2017 Scholar-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Performance and Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. His teaching and research interests include American, African American, and Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture; the life and work of James Baldwin; racial visuality and US popular culture; post-colonialism and diaspora; as well as urban form and politics in the context of the global. He is coeditor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (Winter 2013); contributing editor of The James Baldwin Review; guest critic of the October 2016 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, which focuses on James Baldwin; and is completing the introduction for an e-book of selections from Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, and poems from Jimmy’s Blues. He is presently at work on his book project, “Trembling on the Edge of Confession: James Baldwin and National Innocence in Modern American Culture.” Blint has held faculty, research, and administrative appointments at Columbia University, Barnard College, Hunter College, and the Murphy Institute at the Graduate and University Center, CUNY; and has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundations.