Mark Sanders

Mark Sanders is a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame where he is also the chair in the department of Africana Studies. He specializes in 20th century African American literature and culture and Afro-Latino literature and culture, focusing on the links between American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. His research seeks to recover lost or ignored historical voices that describe the African American experience. Sanders has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2018.

His research interests include American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Cuban literature and culture. 

He is a widely-published author who has written four books, including Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South, co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell (Oxford University Press, 2007). He also translated A Black Soldier's Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), the only memoir by a non-white soldier from the Cuban War of Independence. He is currently working on a volume about the work of Harlem Renaissance writer Anne Spencer.  

He previously served as chair of the Department of African American Studies at Emory University and received a Fulbright fellowship in 2014 to study Afro-Colombian print culture in Columbia. He earned a PhD and MA in English from Brown University and a BA in English from Oberlin College.