Kinohi Nishikawa | Department of English

Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. He earned his A.B. in English from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. At Princeton Nishikawa teaches courses on African American humor, African American literary history, and Afro-Asian studies.

Nishikawa’s first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His major work in progress is Black Paratext, a study of how book design has influenced the production and reception of African American literature from World War II to the present. Nishikawa has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, magazines, and independent publishers.

Recent publications include an essay on black experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley in American Literary History (2018) and an article on the Black Arts photography book In Our Terribleness in Chicago Review (2019). Nishikawa has also contributed chapters to the edited collections Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights (Illinois, 2019), Against a Sharp White Background (Wisconsin, 2019), The Edinburgh History of Reading (Edinburgh, 2020), and Are You Entertained? New Essays on Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke, 2020).