The author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned him an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press, Wallace is also co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Maurice has published a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, and several scholarly articles ranging topically from the religious roots of African American literature to photography, disability, and Black oratory.

Among his recent publications is King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., a study of the soundscapes, architectures, and technologies that shaped Martin Luther King, Jr’s unforgettable preaching and public oratory.

Currently, Wallace is at work on two monographs: a book tentatively titled Objects and Uplift: Frederick Douglass, New Materialism, and the Black Hermeneutics of Things which follows from Wallace’s interests in Blackness and scholarly currents in post-humanism; and Black Trees, a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US. 

In general, Wallace teaches nineteenth and twenty-century African American Literature, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and Black Cultural Studies (especially where it intersects with sound and visual culture).