Dr. Christopher Allen Varlack is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arcadia University (2020-present) where he teaches undergraduate as well as graduate courses in African-American literature, world literature, and creative writing. Before joining the faculty at Arcadia, he worked with students as a full-time lecturer at UMBC (2014-2018), where he taught as part of the Individualized Study Program, the Honors College, and the Department of English. He has also served as a full-time lecturer in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University (2012-2014).

He was the recipient of the 2021 Cultural Ally Award here at Arcadia. In addition to his role in the Department of English, he served as the Director of University Seminars for the Arcadia Undergraduate Curriculum (AUC) and as Associate Director of the Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action (CASAA) for the 2021-2022 academic year. He is the current Executive Director of CASAA, Director of the Pan African Studies Program, and Chair of the Faculty Senate Work & Welfare Committee. 

​In addition to promoting the education of today's youth, he is an avid researcher and scholar with emphases on race, gender, and cultural politics, having published in journals such as the College Language Association Journal, Third Stone Journal, and the South Atlantic Review in addition to a number of edited volumes. He has served as editor of Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance (2015) as well as Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past and Present (2017) and is currently editing Zora Neale Hurston in Context for Cambridge University Press and Black Lives Matter: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance for Clemson University Press. He served for two terms as president of the Langston Hughes Society.

When he is not in the classroom or producing scholarship, he can be found writing poetry and creative non-fiction addressing issues of social justice, identity, and race. For additional information about Dr. Varlack and his work, please visit his website at BlkLitProfessor.com.

Publications

• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “‘this is my space / I am not movin’: Responses to the Threat of Recolonization in the Poetic Activism of Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange.” The Langston Hughes Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2022, pp. 49-70.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Revisiting Claude McKay’s ‘Quashie to Buccra’: ‘Language…[as] a Political Instrument’ in Disenfranchising Linguistic and Sociopolitical Systems.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 85, no. 3, 2020, pp. 152-170.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Memoirs of ‘When the Negro was in Vogue’: Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism, and the African-American Autobiographical Tradition.” College Language Association Journal, vol. 64, no. 4, 2019, pp. 237-257.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Racial Reassignment Surgery and the Dissolution of the Color Line: Afrofuturist Satire in George Schuyler’s Black No More and Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine.” Third Stone Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2019, pp. 17-28.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “‘Never . . . Let Color Interfere’: The Insurgent Black Intellectual Writing of Jessie Redmon Fauset.” Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History, edited by Hettie V. Williams, Praeger, 2017, pp. 83-100.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Towards a Trans-Atlantic Approach: Tracing the Modernist Psychodrama and Wasteland Critique in the Poetry of the Political Imagination.” Writing the Harlem Renaissance: Revisiting the Vision, edited by Emily Allen-Williams, Lexington, 2017, pp. 13-28.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “‘Crooning [the] Lullabies [of] Ghosts’: Reclamation and Witness as Socio-Political Protest in the Short Fiction of Alice Walker.” Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature—Past & Present, edited by Christopher Allen Varlack, Salem/Grey House, 2017, pp. 151-173.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen, editor. Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past & Present. Salem/Grey House, 2017.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen, editor. Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance. Salem/Grey House, 2015.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “‘A Canticle of My Reaction’: Socio-Cultural Criticism in Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home.” Critical Insights: American Creative Non-Fiction, edited by Jay Ellis, Salem/Grey House, 2015, pp. 95-109.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Writing Across the Color Line: Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and the Insatiable Hunger for Literature of Black American Life.” Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance, edited by Christopher Allen Varlack, Grey House, 2015, pp. 233-347.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Toward a Theory of Art as Propaganda: Re-Evaluating Political Engagement in the Novels of the Harlem Renaissance Era.” Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance, edited by Christopher Allen Varlack, Salem/Grey House, 2015, pp. 89-103.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “‘It Had Grown Into a Machine: Transience of Identity and the Search for a Room of One’s Own in Quicksand and Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral.” Critical Insights: Mid-20th Century Women Writers, edited by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Salem, 2014, pp. 152-166.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and the Rise of Minority Literature.” Baby Boomers and Popular Culture: An Inquiry into America’s Most Powerful Generation, edited by Brian Cogan and Thom Gencarelli, Praeger, 2014, pp. 339-349.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “Unspeakable Things Spoken: Re-Evaluating the Slave Narrative as a Response to Antebellum Anti-Abolition Politicking.” Critical Insights: The Slave Narrative, edited by Kimberly Drake, Salem, 2014, pp. 113-127.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “The Colored American Revisited: The Role of the Black Press in the Abolition Movement.” Defining Documents in American History: Manifest Destiny and the New Nation (1803-1860), Salem, 2013, pp. 468-475.
• Varlack, Christopher Allen. “The Gender Mountain: The Architecture of Male/Female Roles and Relationships in Hurston’s Short Fiction.” Critical Insights: Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Sharon Lynette Jones, Salem, 2013, pp. 101-122.

Courses Taught

• EN 699: Master’s Thesis in English
• EN 651: The Harlem Renaissance–History & Classics
• EN344/444: Special Studies Seminar
• EN 341/441: The (Neo) Slave and Captivity Narrative
• EN 335/435: Special Topics in American Literature
• US 253: Science Fiction and Social Reality
• EN 231: The African American Short Story
• EN 230: African American Literature
• EN 230 Literature of the African Diaspora
• EN 211: Creative Non-Fiction Workshop
• EN104: Writing for the Academic Conversation
• EN 101H: Thought & Expression I (Honors)

MA Theses Directed

• Clever, Natasha. "‘Art as Propaganda’: The Making of the White Savior and Its Disciples," 2023
• King, Myisha. “Performative Allyship, the White Gaze, and the Barriers of Black Representation in Literary Fiction,” 2022.
• Edwards, Deja. “Keeping It in the Family: An Analysis of Cultural Trauma and Racial Violence in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing,” 2021.