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). CHOICE named How White Men Won the Culture Wars an Outstanding Academic Title for 2022, and the New Republic called it “original and persuasive” and “a wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene.” I’m currently writing a book investigating what our most popular culture, sports, an industry premised on the sorting and hierarchizing of bodies, has taught the nation about race, gender, and labor since civil rights.

I have published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, 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.”

At TCU, I’m a founding member of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department, for which I have served on the Executive Committee and as Director of Graduate Studies, and an associate member of the Women and Gender Studies Department. In March, I will deliver the 15th Annual AddRan Distinguished Faculty Lecture, “Saturday Night Lights: The Integration of College Football and the End of the Full Ride.”

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