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ENGL5620 Studies in Contemporary African American Literature and Culture

Ressorces

Research Resources for ENGL 5620

Databases

(Note: the dates indicate the dates of the sources included, not the themes or subject matter; many of these include research on earlier periods)

Literary Studies (primarily secondary literature & criticism, theory, etc.)

African-American History & Culture (many of these are “primary” sources—documents, newspaper articles, interviews, memoirs, personal writings, etc. Good for historical or social context)

Women & Gender Studies (a mix of primary and secondary sources)

Some tips on researching with these databases:

  1. Develop a list of search terms based on your topic, subject, objects of study (book, author, period, etc.) and ideas that you’re interested in exploring.
     

For example:
“Nella Larsen” AND “black wom*n” AND “disability” AND “affect”

“Black madness” AND “crip” AND “pop* culture”                  

“[book title]” AND “disability studies” AND

Remember to use alternative terms, spellings, or synonyms, as needed. Also, use “wild card” symbols (*, ?, etc.) to get variations on certain words.
Look in the list of Subject Terms in any sources you find that seem useful.

  1. Start “narrow” and expand your searches from there, not vice versa. Try being specific in your search terms at first and if you don’t find what you need, reduce your number of terms or use broader terms to increase results.
  2. Use the filters included in each database to narrow your results by date range, source type, subject terms, or whatever else is useful to you.
  3. If you find a useful article, look closely at the record to identify additional subject terms, author names, publication titles, publishers, etc. that could be used as additional search terms.
  4. If you don’t find a link to a full text, copy the citation and use our ILL service to get a copy of most journal articles or book chapters, usually within a couple of days.
  5. I recommend searching one database at a time, rather than using the feature that lets you select multiple databases, only because not every database offers the same interface, filters, or search options, so you may miss some valuable sources.
  6. I recommend NOT taking time to search databases in fields like Psychology, Medicine, or Sociology right now. These will lead you down rabbit holes to sources that are heavy on technical jargon, scientific data and analysis, or information that isn’t easily applicable to literary or cultural studies without further research and training. UNLESS you already have a background in one of these fields.
  7. For your Book Review assignment, find one or two good journals in your area of interest (Black Feminist Studies, Disability Studies, Affect Theory, etc.) and look at a few scholarly book reviews in those journals as a model. You can search journal titles in the same tab (Databases & E-Resources) from the library homepage to find electronic journals that we subscribe to. You can search those journals using similar search terms as above.