AREAS OF EXPERTISE
COURSES TAUGHT
BIO
Zay Dale is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature and a recipient of a University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. He studies Black masculinity and the aesthetics of Black violence in Early to Mid-20th Century Black texts. He is interested in examining the radical irruptions of Black violence in 20th Century Black texts, and studies how, where, and why violence happens in Black texts. Some questions that guide Zay’s research are: Do we get restorative justice through the aesthetics of Black violence? Where do the facts of Black death and fiction meet? How does the fact of Black death bleed into its fictionalization? What is the distinction between Black violent form and content in literature? Does Black death have to be qualified as a spectacle once its narrative is reclaimed by Black people? Can Black violence be understood as un/gendered? Why do we need to transmute Black death into literature? What is the distinction between violence of the flesh and violence of the skin, or violence of the physical and violence of the metaphysical?