Faith Barter

Faith Barter is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon, where she is also affiliated faculty with the Black Studies program, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department.

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Her research interests include African American literature from the 19th century to the present, legal history, and formations of Black privacy and sovereignty. Her current book project, Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in 19th-Century African American Literature, examines the innovative and imaginative ways that Black writers in the first half of the 19th century used legal form in literature ranging from autobiography and protest literature to short stories and fiction. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, MELUS, Law, Culture, & Humanities, and in an edited collection on Bruno Latour and law. Her research has been supported by the Oregon Humanities Center, the First Book Institute at Pennsylvania State University, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. She is in the early stages of research on two additional books, one on Afrofuturism in the 19th century, and one on Black literary theories of reparative justice and tort law.

 

Dr. Barter teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on numerous topics in African American, Afro-Caribbean, and U.S. American literature and legal studies. In 2023-2024, she will hold a Wulff Professorship in the Humanities through the Oregon Humanities Center to develop new coursework in Black literature and Black Studies.

 

She received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and her J.D. from American University’s Washington College of Law. She practiced law for several years at a global law firm in Washington, D.C. prior to beginning her Ph.D.