About Dr. Johnson

Michael K. Johnson (PhD, University of Kansas) is an associate professor of English at the University of Maine-Farmington, where he teaches courses in American and African American literature, multicultural and ethnic literatures, and literature and film. His primary research interest is the portrayal of African Americans in the literature and cinema of the American West, which is the focus of his book, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Other publications include articles in African American Review, Literature/Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Western American Literature. His current project is a book-length biography of Harlem Renaissance–era singer Taylor Gordon and his sister Rose Gordon.

Some of Dr. Johnson’s published articles include:

“Looking for the Big Picture: Percival Everett’s Western Fiction.” Western American Literature 42.1 (Spring 2007): 26-53.

“Teaching Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Race, Justice, Violence, and the American West.” The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity. Ed. Jami Carlacio. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2007. 166-76.

“‘The Like of Which is Found Nowhere Else in All the World’: Placing and Imagining an African American West.” Western American Literature 41.3 (Fall 2006): 336-44.

“Cowboys, Cooks, and Comics: African American Characters in Westerns of the 1930s.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.3 (2005): 225-35.

“‘Try to Refrain from that Desire’: Self-Control and Violent Passion in Oscar Micheaux’s African American Western.” African American Review 38.3 (Fall 2004): 361-77.

“‘This Strange White World’: Race and Place in Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter.” Great Plains Quarterly 24.2 (Spring 2004): 101–11.

“Hoo-Doo Cowboys: African Americans and the Western Frontier in Film and Fiction.” The Maine Scholar 15 (Autumn 2002): 185–96.

“Migration, Masculinity, and Racial Identity in Taylor Gordon’s Born to Be.” Moving Stories: Migration and the American West. Ed. Scott E. Casper. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. 119–41.

“‘Stranger in a Strange Land’: An African American Response to the Frontier Tradition in Oscar Micheaux’s The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer.” Western American Literature 33.3 (Fall 1998): 228–52.