Brandeis University |
Faith L. Smith
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Areas of Specialization
- African and Afro-American literature
- Anglophone Caribbean
Background and Description
Faith Smith is an Associate Professor. She also holds appointments in the English and American Literature Department, the Women's Studies Department, where she is Undergraduate Advising Head, and the Latin American Studies Program. Her most recent courses include "Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work," "Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Texts and Contexts," "Introduction to Literary Method," and a Graduate Seminar entitled "Reading the Black Transnation." In Summer 2005 she plans to teach Novel and Film of the African Diaspora and Caribbean Women Writers.
She received a BA from the University of the West Indies, Mona (Jamaica), with a concentration in English, an M. A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph D in Literature from Duke University. She held the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, in 2002-2003.
Her book, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, New World Studies Series, 2002), provides a context for understanding twentieth-century Caribbean writers such as C.L.R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid. Thomas was well known for his 1869 study of Trinidad's Creole language, as well as for an early example of "writing back to empire" -- his response to a Victorian travel narrative. As a defender of francophone cultural production in a British colony, a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and a pan-Africanist whose commitments were simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas' interests complicate current discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life.
Faith Smith is currently working on two projects. The first, an edited collection of essays on "Sexuality and Citizenship in the Caribbean," pursues some of the issues addressed in a special issue on Genders and Sexualities that she guest-edited for the journal Small Axe in 2002. The second is a book manuscript on conceptions of modernity across the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A member of the Small Axe collective, she is an editorial advisor for the Journal of West Indian Literature published by the Departments of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, and Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, published by the Department of English at the University of Miami. She is an Associate Editor of the revised edition of the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, which will be published under the general editorship of Professor Colin Palmer by Thomson Gale Publishers.