March 30, 2011

Media: The Present Future of Caribbean Literary & Cultural Studies


Podcasts and photos for the Present Future of Caribbean Literary & Cultural Studies are now available on the Center for Humanities web site: http://humanities.miami.edu/symposia/paquet.

Participants:


Michael A. Bucknor is Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) on a Commonwealth Scholarship. At Western, he won the 1997 McIntosh Award for the best Ph.D dissertation lecture and, subsequently, the 1999 USIS Postdoctoral Fellowship on “Contemporary American Literature and Culture” (University of Louisville) and the 2002 Du bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan.. He has been the Chair of the Adjudication Panel for the Canada and Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, an editor of Journal of West Indian Literature and Postcolonial Text and is currently Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). Dr. Bucknor’s research interests include Caribbean/Canadian writing, Austin Clarke, masculinities, postcolonial literatures and theory and cultural studies. He has co-edited with Prof. Alison Donnell The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature forthcoming March 2011 and is completing a manuscript entitled, “Performing Masculinities in Jamaican Popular Culture.”

Lara Cahill is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Miami. Her research includes the intersections between literature and geography, environmental criticism, processes of transculturation, and Cuban zarzuela. B.A. in English and Spanish, Virginia Tech, 2000; M.A. English in English, University of Miami, 2005.

Donette Francis is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University, where she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and the Senior Honors Program.   Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, African Diaspora Literary Studies, Globalization and Transnational Feminist Studies, and Theories of Sexuality and Citizenship.  A graduate of New York University’s American Studies Program, she has recently published Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.  Her published articles appear in numerous journals including: Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, Research in African Literatures and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir.

Rhonda D. Frederick (MA/PhD, University of Pennsylvania) teaches Caribbean, African American, and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where she also directs the African and African Diaspora Studies Program (AADS). Her research interests include contemporary popular fiction (speculative, horror, detective, and mystery fictions), literatures of the African Diaspora, Post-colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and narratives of migration.  She is the author of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Lexington Books, 2005) and articles published in several peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.

Glyne Griffith has a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He served as Chair of the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies from 2006 to 2010. He is the author of Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel, and co-editor, with Linden Lewis, of Color, Hair and Bone:Race in the 21st Century. He is completing a book on the BBC “Caribbean Voices” literary radio program and the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature.

George Lamming of Barbados is a world renowned intellectual, writer, critic and educator. Lamming, chosen as the 2004 Distinguished Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, is currently Visiting Professor in the Africana Department at Brown University. He has held many prestigious academic positions including 1998-2000 scholar-in-residence at City College of the University of New York where he delivered the Langston Hughes Lecture at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Other recipients of the distinguished Langston Hughes Festival Award include James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Lamming exploded onto the literary scene in 1953 with his first novel In the Castle of My Skin which won the Somerset Maugham Award for literature, and was championed by leading writers and intellectuals such as Jean Paul Satre and Richard Wright. In the Castle of My Skin, a novel about a Caribbean childhood and the realities of colonialism remains the most widely read of West Indian novels. Lamming, author of six novels, describes himself as a "political novelist" and has been closely involved in the political and cultural events of the Caribbean and Commonwealth over the last 50 years, remaining an astute critic and commentator on political, historical and cultural events.

Paula Morgan is Senior Lecturer, Head of the Department of Liberal Arts, and Coordinator of the Cultural Studies graduate program at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine, Trinidad.  Her primary areas of research, teaching, and publication are gender and ethnic relations in the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Dr. Morgan has produced and/or co-authored four books, the latest being Writing Rage: Unmaskin Violence in Caribbean Discourse with Valerie Youssef.

Supriya Nair is an Associate Professor at the Department of English at Tulane University.  She is the author of Caliban’s Curse:  George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and co-editor of Postcolonialisms:  An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers UP, 2005).  She is editor of the MLA Options in Teaching Series:  Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (forthcoming) and has completed a manuscript on Anglophone Caribbean literature.  She has written and taught on topics related to postcolonial and feminist theory, African and Caribbean literature.

Kezia Page is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Caribbean Studies at Colgate University. Her work is a socio-cultural analysis of Caribbean migrant and diaspora literature in North America and Britain. It responds to critical movements in Caribbean theory that configure the region as borderless, as a space outside of place. Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (fall 2002), M.A. in English, University of Miami (1998), B.A. in English, University of the West Indies, Mona (1996).

Sandra Pouchet Paquet (Ph.D., Connecticut, 1977) is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Miami and the major faculty advisor in Caribbean Literary Studies. She teaches in the fields of Caribbean Literature, African-American Literature, and Women's Studies. She is the author of The Novels of George Lamming (1982), Caribbean Autobiography (2002), and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). She has published numerous book and journal articles in Caribbean and African-American Literature, was guest editor of special issues of Callaloo ( "Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean" 1997), andJournal of West Indian Literature (Volume 8, Number 1: October 1998 and Volume 8, Number 2: April 1999). She was Director of the pioneering Caribbean Writers' Summer Institute at the University of Miami (1992-1996).

Patricia Saunders is an assistant professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. Her work has appeared in The Bucknell Review,CalabashPlantation Society in the Americas and Small Axe. She is currently completing a manuscript titled Re-Patri-nation: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity. Her manuscript traces the emergence of literary nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean and maps its transformations through discourses of exile, national and sexual identity, and Diaspora race politics in three cultural and political contexts: pre-independence Trinidad, post-independence Britain and the Civil rights era in the United States. Other works in progress include an edited collection of essays on Jamaican popular culture.

Stephen Stuempfle is Executive Director of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Steve received a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania and has conducted field research in Trinidad, Texas and Florida. Over the past two decades, he has assisted a variety of arts and historical organizations and has taught courses on folk and popular culture at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Miami. From 2000-2008 he was Chief Curator of the Historical Museum of South Florida in Miami with responsibilities in the direction of research projects; archival and object collections; and exhibition programs related to the history and cultural traditions of South Florida and the Caribbean He is the author of The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and has written about Caribbean music for several journals and encyclopedias. He is also co-editor, with Sandra Pouchet Paquet and Patricia J. Saunders, of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Ian Randle Publishers, 2007).

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