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Clifford Lecture: March 29, 2025
Marisa J. Fuentes, Ph.D.
Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Marisa J. Fuentes is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the histories of gender, slavery, the Caribbean and Black Atlantic worlds. She is the author of the award-winning book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), which won book prizes from the Association of Black Women Historians, The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and The Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association. She is also co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I to III (Rutgers University Press, 2016-2021), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (2016). In March 2023, Fuentes was elected to the Society of American Historians which “honors literary distinction in the writing of history and biography.” Most recently, in April 2024, Fuentes was elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Fuentes’ recent publications the “Afterword,” with Sarah Haley in Saidiya Hartman’s Second edition of Scenes of Subjection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022), “Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives” (English Language Notes 21), “Genres of History and the Practice of Loss: Attending to Silence in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands” (Small Axe 2021), and “‘Attending to Black Death:’ Black Women’s Bodies in the Archive and the Afterlife of Captivity—A Reflection” (Diacritics 2020). Her next book, Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, explores the connections between capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the 2024/2025 academic year, Fuentes will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.