- Ph.D., Indiana University, 2001
- M.A., University of Virginia, 1996
- B.A., Indiana University, 1994
Walton Muyumba
Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor, English
- wmuyumba@indiana.edu
- Ballantine Hall 425
- Office Hours
Education
About Walton Muyumba
Muyumba’s areas of interest and specialization include African American literature, global Black literature, American literature, literary and arts criticism, creative nonfiction, Black Atlantic studies, jazz studies, cultural studies, pragmatism, and postcolonial studies.
He has published literary essays and reviews in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other outlets.
His scholarship has appeared in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, Film Quarterly, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisational Studies, among other edited volumes and journals.
Muyumba co-edited and wrote the introduction to John Edgar Wideman’s collection, You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories, 1981–2018 (Scribner, 2021).
He’s at work on an essay collection, a book of poetry criticism, and a memoir.
Recent Publications
Selected Essays, Creative Nonfiction:
“Seeds.” Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2023.
“Artists in Residence: Jason Moran and the Bandwagon Improvising Freedom (After Kentridge, Kelly, Walker, and Komunyakaa)” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, 5.2, October 2021.
“Floating in Time with John Edgar Wideman.” The New York Review of Books, 6 April 2021.
Selected Essays, Literary Criticism:
“Citizen: An Assemblage of Experience.” Alta Journal. 30 March 2023.
“Teju Cole’s Elegiac View of the World.” Rev. of Black Paper: Writing in Dark Times. The Nation. 9 November 2022.
Book Reviews:
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. The Boston Globe 13 July 2023.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. The Boston Globe 27 April 2023.
Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm. The Boston Globe 10 January 2023.
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell. The Boston Globe 25 September 2022.
Interviews:
“Reviewers & Critics: WALTON MUYUMBA.” Conducted by Michael Taekens. Poets & Writers Magazine 49.5 (2021).
Selected Peer-Reviewed Scholarship
Film Criticism:
“Global Black Cinema’s Personalized Archive: Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes.” Film Quarterly, 76.3, 2023.
“Thinking About The Underground Railroad: with Michael Gillespie, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Kristen J.Warner.” Film Quarterly, 75.2, 2021.
Music Criticism:
“The Rumba Archive.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 35.2.
The College of Arts