Rate My Professor RJ Boutelle

RJ Boutelle is an associate professor of English and Area Director of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Cincinnati, with affiliate faculty appointments in Africana Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He specializes in literature, employing transnational approaches to African American literature and nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Boutelle received his PhD in English from Vanderbilt University in 2016, an MA in English from Vanderbilt in 2012, a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009, and a BA in Philosophy and Spanish from the same institution in 2009. His scholarly work explores the tensions between racial, national, and transnational identities through the lived experiences of diaspora, as well as African American reappropriations of racial nationalism in the context of U.S. expansionism, including debates over Manifest Destiny, colonization, Black emigration, and Black nationalism.

Boutelle is the author of the monograph The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), which was a 2024 finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History awarded by the African American Intellectual History Society. His peer-reviewed journal articles include "‘Greater Still in Death’: Race, Martyrology, and the Reanimation of Juan Placido" in American Literature (2018), "Manifest Diaspora: Black Transamerican Politics and Autoarchiving in Slavery in Cuba" in MELUS (2015), and "‘The Most Perfect Picture of Cuban Slavery’: Transatlantic Bricolage in Manzano’s and Madden’s Poems by a Slave" in Atlantic Studies (2013). He has also published book chapters such as “Genealogy and Nonhistory in ‘Adolphus, A Tale’” in Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and “The Uses and Limits of Black Internationalism” in African American Literature in Transition, 1880–1900 (Cambridge University Press). Currently, he is editing a new critical edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and researching a microhistory of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre involving an inscribed copy of the novel. Boutelle teaches courses on African American literature and nineteenth-century U.S. literature.