Research Interests:

Mid-19th, 20th, and 21st century African American literature and cultural history; contemporary African American poetry and poetics; Nonfiction Studies; Popular Romance Studies; Critical Love Studies; Quare Studies; Performance Studies; critical race theory;  queer of color critique; black masculinities; substance and alcohol use disorders; HIV/AIDS narratives and culture 

Profile:

Darius Stewart is a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Fellow and PhD student in English Literary Studies with a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies, specializing in African American Literature and Culture from 1831 to the present, while also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. His primary research interests combine various methodologies such as queer of color critique and the emerging fields of Popular Romance Studies, Critical Love Studies, Performance Studies and the Deleuzian conception of desire to interrogate black masculinities within black gay material culture: including the black gay (or M/M) romance novel, romantic film and television, digital and social media, and adult blogging platforms and marketplaces.  

Before coming to Iowa, Darius received an honors BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee—Knoxville and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry. In 2017, he enrolled in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where he graduated in 2020 with an MFA in English (nonfiction writing). As a graduate instructor, he taught nonfiction courses and masterclasses for the NWP and also for the General Education Literature Program, where he served as a Program Associate during the 2018-2019 academic year and was awarded the John C. Gerber Teaching Award. Other honors include the Magdalena Essay Prize, Graduate Diversity Fellowship, Englert Nonfiction Fellowship, and the Provost Postgraduate Fellowship in Nonfiction, for which he was also the Visiting Assistant Professor and Writer in Nonfiction for 2020-2021. 

Darius is awaiting the publication of his first full-length collection of poems and lives in Iowa City with his dog, Fry.