Jürgen E. Grandt has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in African American Studies and American Studies in both Europe and the United States. At the University of North Georgia, he teaches Freshman Composition, African American literature, as well as early American literature, particularly the American slave narrative. He also serves on the board of reviewers for Papers and Pubs: A Southeastern Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research. He is the author of two acclaimed critical monographs, Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (The Ohio State University Press, 2004) and Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism (The Ohio State University Press, 2009), and of numerous articles. Among his current scholarly endeavors is Gettin' Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism (under review at the University of Georgia Press), which examines how planetary amplifications of the jazz aesthetic strive, in various ways, toward an imaginative reconfiguration of a humanity that transcends entrenched borders of ethnicity and nationhood, while at the same time remaining keenly aware of the exigencies of history.