Department of English

Faith Smith

Faith SmithMarta F. Kauffman '78 Professorship in African and African American Studies
Associate Professor of English
PhD, Duke University

Research Interest

Intellectual and Literary History of the Caribbean, particularly Anglophone; Popular Culture; Gender and Sexuality; African Diaspora aesthetics; African American Literature; Postcolonial Literature.

Selected PublicationsSex and the Citizen book cover

  • Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century. Duke University Press (2023).
  • “Fabricating Intimacies: Artificial Silk and Cloth Wives in the Interwar Moment” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 12 (2018).
  • “And For You I Played A Sorrow Song: Looking At Frances Johnston’s Sorrow Songs With Carrie Mae Weems” in Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement, Eds. Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson
  • “The Soundings With My Sisters: Sovereignty, Intimacy, Disappointment” Small Axe 54 (2017).
  • “Good Enough for Booker T to Kiss: Hampton, Tuskegee, and Caribbean Self-Fashioning.” Journal
    of Transnational American Studies 5, 1 (2013).

  • "Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean", University of Virginia Press, 2011. Editor.

  • "Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: the Black Experience in the Americas". 2nd ed. 6 vols. New York: Macmillan Reference, USA, 2006. Editor-in-Chief Colin Palmer. Associate Editors Lisa Gail Collins, Marcyliena Morgan, Faith Smith, James Sweet, and Robert Reid-Pharr.

  • "Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late 19th-Century Caribbean", University of Virginia Press, 2002.

  • Guest Editor, Small Axe, 7 (March 2000). Special issue on "Genders and Sexualities."

  • "Coming Home to the Real Thing: Gender and Intellectual Life in the Anglophone Caribbean." South Atlantic Quarterly 93, 4 (Fall 1994): 895-923.

  • Articles and reviews in Small Axe, Callaloo, Research in African Literature, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Shibboleths: Journal of Comparative Theory, Trinidad and Tobago Review. 

Awards

  • Dean of Arts & Sciences Faculty Service Award, 2020

  • Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Residential Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, 2008-09

  • Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina for 2002-03

Selected Courses Taught

  • Black Looks (ENG 80A)
  • Caribbean’s Asias (ENG 72A)
  • Reading the Black Transnation (ENG 237a)

  • Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts (ENG 127b)Novel and Film of the African Diaspora (AAAS 134B)

  • Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work (AAAS 125B)