Faculty Spotlight: Taylor Black
Associate Professor of English Taylor Black specializes in 20th-century American literature, popular music studies and queer theory. A Duke faculty member since 2019, he is currently working on two projects: the American fascination with cults and cult leaders; and a cultural history of New York’s downtown arts scene during the 1980s. Black is the author of the 2023 book “Style: A Queer Cosmology” and a recipient of the 2025-26 Langford Lectureship Award.
Q&A
How would you describe your main area of focus, and what first got you interested in this field?
I’m interested in 20th-century American stuff — literature, music, visual art, film, television, etc. Like any American, I believe in the power of personality and have been paying close attention to extreme and remarkable figures from popular culture for my entire life. When I was young, for instance, I was obsessed with the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.” I never understood why other children hated and feared her. She was everything I wanted to be: self-assured, powerful and mysterious. I loved the way the Witch appeared in the movie, never invited but always right on time.
In graduate school I cultivated my early admiration for the Witch into a method for studying things and qualities that elude paraphrase or social scientific categorization. I began collecting untimely and fierce subjects that were, like her, essentially strange and in need of attention. I found traditional literary figures like Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor, and others from popular culture, like Quentin Crisp and Bob Dylan. I am on the lookout for the possible rather than the probable, singularity over universals, personality instead of identity, the emergent and not the new — the mystery of becoming.
Could you tell us about something you’re currently working on?
Considering my interest in personality, and in figures of American culture that move easily (and strangely) between the mainstream and the underground, I have spent the last year or so knee-deep in materials from Andy Warhol and the multitude of weirdos comprising his social and professional worlds.
What advice can you share regarding teaching and mentoring students?
In a world full of artificially intelligent summaries and truly stupefying political discourse, our classrooms are perhaps one of the only places safe from the tedious clichés of the present. It is our job to help our students learn how to create meaning for themselves, by way of absorbing a text or an idea and then learning how to interpret their reaction to it in their own way. We have to show them the benefits of living life in the old style, following our senses and expanding our powers of perception.
What has kept you at Duke?
Wonderful colleagues and students. And Durham!
Would you like to share something you enjoy doing for fun or relaxation?
Running long distances and listening to recordings of recent Bob Dylan concerts is, for me, the perfect mix of routine and surprise.