2017 Peter C. Rollins Award for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals
Awarded by Southwest Popular/American Culture Association

Peter C. Rollins Award for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals
Awarded by American Library Association

2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

Awarded by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education Emerging Scholar

Summa cum laude
Certificate in European Cultural Studies

An English professor struggling for tenure discovers that her ex-fiancé has just become the president of her college—and her new boss—in this whip-smart modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic Persuasion.Anne Corey is about to get schooled. An English professor in California, she’s determined to score a position on the coveted tenure track at her college. All she’s got to do is get a book deal, snag a promotion, and boom! She’s in. But then Adam Martinez—her first love and ex-fiancé—shows up as the college’s new president. Anne should be able to keep herself distracted. After all, she’s got a book to write, an aging father to take care of, and a new romance developing with the college’s insanely hot writer-in-residence. But no matter where she turns, there’s Adam, as smart and sexy as ever. As the school year advances and her long-buried feelings begin to resurface, Anne begins to wonder whether she just might get a second chance at love. Funny, smart, and full of heart, this modern ode to Jane Austen’s classic explores what happens when we run into the demons of our past...and when they turn out not to be so bad, after all.

By the Book: A Book Club Recommendation!

It was the age of Jim Crow, riddled with racial violence and unrest. But in the world of Our Gang, black and white children happily played and made mischief together. They even had their own black and white version of the KKK, the Cluck Cluck Klams—and the public loved it.The story of race and Our Gang, or The Little Rascals, is rife with the contradictions and aspirations of the sharply conflicted, changing American society that was its theater. Exposing these connections for the first time, Julia Lee shows us how much this series, from the first silent shorts in 1922 to its television revival in the 1950s, reveals about black and white American culture—on either side of the silver screen. Behind the scenes, we find unconventional men like Hal Roach and his gag writers, whose Rascals tapped into powerful American myths about race and childhood. We meet the four black stars of the series—Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, and Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas—the gang within the Gang, whose personal histories Lee pursues through the passing years and shifting political landscape.In their checkered lives, and in the tumultuous life of the series, we discover an unexplored story of America, the messy, multiracial nation that found in Our Gang a comic avatar, a slapstick version of democracy itself.

Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of writings by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other former slaves on British fiction in the years between the Abolition Act and the Emancipation Proclamation. Julia Sun-Joo Lee argues that novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to British culture.

The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

Located between the Pacific Ocean and downtown Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University is a comprehensive university offering 60 major programs, 55 minor undergraduate degrees and programs. The Graduate Division offers 39 master’s degree programs and one education doctorate, one juris doctorate and 10 credential programs. 
 
Founded in 1911, LMU is ranked third in “Best Regional Universities (West)” by U.S. News and World Report. LMU is the largest Jesuit Catholic university for undergraduates on the West Coast, with more than 6,000 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. The state-of-the-art The William H. Hannon Library rates among the 20 best in the country according to The Princeton Review’s guide to “The Best 378 Colleges,” 2014. Bloomberg Businessweek ranks LMU sixth in the nation and third in the West in its 2013 Part-Time MBA rankings.

Loyola Marymount University

Julia Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. A native of Los Angeles, she has previously taught at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of Southern California, where she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities. Her first book, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Her second book, Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals” was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2015. She has also published a novel, By The Book (2018), under the pen name Julia Sonneborn. She has written for the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, and Zocalo Public Square.

Julia Lee

Media

Biography

Education

Harvard University

Harvard University

Princeton University

Accomplishments

Peter C. Rollins Award for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title for Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education Emerging Scholar

Languages

Media Appearances

Midday Sunday: Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

Author Julia Lee joins Elvis Mitchell to discuss how a children’s show from the 1920s attempted to transcend racism

Our Gang Chronicles Lives of African American Actors in The Little Rascals