Anna Hartnell is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the
University of Birmingham. Her research interests centre on
representations of race and religion in American literature and
culture, and the ways in which the US might be viewed in a
postcolonial context. This has led to a wider interest in the
cross-currents between the black and Jewish diasporas. Current
research, which includes work on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
Barack Obama and Hurricane Katrina, is currently being written up
as a monograph entitled Imagining Exodus: Race, Religion, and
the Narratives of Black America (Pluto Press).