Torleif Persson received his bachelor’s in Theoretical Philosophy from Lund University and his doctorate in Literatures in English from Rutgers University. He is an experienced writing instructor and a scholar of literature. His research focuses on 20th and 21st century American and Anglophone literature, with a primary emphasis on how postwar American authors use forms of address to query the evolving political meaning of blackness. Secondary research and teaching fields include critical theory, science fiction and the history of the novel. Prior to joining the Department of English Language and Literature at Smith, Persson was an Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University.

Selected Publications

“Ralph Ellison’s Contemporaneity.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 53:1. (Spring 2020).

“Impersonal Style and the Form of Experience in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” Studies in the Novel. (Summer 2016).