Biography
Tyler Grand Pre is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and ICLS affiliate at Columbia. His research revolves around figurations of the infrastructure of housing in African Diasporic literature and culture. In both a material and symbolic sense, he explores and compares the meaning of different housing infrastructures, or lack thereof, that have come to define black domestic being in the urban and rural settings of the US and Caribbean. Before earning his MA and MPhil in his current department at Columbia University, Tyler received a BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he double majored in English as well as French and francophone studies. He is therefore interested in translation studies and has translated between French and English for Routledge as well as the NGO Women’s Global Education Project. Tyler is currently co-chairing the black studies colloquium and regularly teaches UW classes for the Undergraduate Writing Program themed around human rights.
