Kenneth Warren

Associate Chair and Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Kenneth Warren is a leading scholar of American and African American literature at the University of Chicago's Department of English. Teaching since 1991, he earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1988 and focuses on intersections of literary form, political change, and racial inequality during the Jim Crow era.

• Education: Ph.D., Stanford University (1988)

His research interrogates how African American literature emerged as a response to Jim Crow, arguing in What Was African American Literature? (2011) that the concept gained coherence only under segregation. He examines paradoxes in Ralph Ellison's work and the broader implications of literary recognition for social order.

Recent publications include analyses of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and critiques of racial categorization. Courses like The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow and Literary Lessons for Economists? (2025) explore race, neoliberalism, and the cultural impact of financial crises.