Welcome! I’m Joseph Darda, an associate professor of literature at Texas Christian University and, for the year, a visiting residential fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. I write and teach about post-1945 American literature, culture, and politics.

I’m the author of three books on the cultural life of race in the United States: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars (California, 2021), and Empire of Defense (Chicago, 2019). I’m currently writing “The Naturals: How Sports Make Race in America,” which asks what our most popular culture, sports, an industry premised on the sorting and hierarchizing of bodies, has taught the nation about race since civil rights.

I have published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, and Representations, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, I’m coediting a forthcoming special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”

Please click on the tabs above if you’d like to learn more about my books or read some of my writing.