Michelle Stephens

Professor of English, Rutgers University

Michelle Stephens joined the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in Spring 2011. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and teaches courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014), in which she uses both psychoanalysis and the study of race as a discourse to analyze select performances of four twentieth century black actors and singers.

She also co-edited a special issue of the Radical History Review, “Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora” (January 2009) and is currently co-editing a collection on “Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture” with Brian Russell Roberts. She is a member of the editorial collective of the Radical History Review, the editorial advisory board of Rowman and Littlefield’s Rethinking The Island book series, and a series co-editor of Rutgers University Press’s Critical Caribbean Studies book series.