Adam McKible is a Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His most recent book is Jim Crow Modernism, a volume co-edited with Keith Clark and Robert Jackson. In this volume and in his previous book, Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity, Adam explains how and why American literary modernism and Jim Crow modernism are deeply and fundamentally intertwined. In this new collection, he and the contributors expand on the definitions. One of those contributors, LaGuardia Community College Professor of English Jesse Schwartz  – who is also a faculty committee member at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center – joins Adam in discussing the new book, the riches of periodical studies, big and little magazines, the blessing and the curse of microfilm versus  digitization, “recovery work,” and what it means for a publication to “register and re-contain.”

Professors McKible and Schwartz have been colleagues for a long time! See below for evidence. Their rapport in this conversation is another delightful testament.

Save the date for the Jim Crow Modernism symposium, Sept. 25, 2026 at the CUNY Graduate Center.