RESEARCH INTERESTS
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’s recent publications include 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.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT:
Undergraduate
- Caribbean History to 1898
- Slavery in the Caribbean
- History Workshop
- Feminist Theory: Historical Perspectives
Graduate
- Gender and the Archive (Feminist Historical Methods)
- Atlantic Cultures and African Diaspora Colloquium: The Black Atlantic
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016
- Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (current book manuscript project-in progress)
- “Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 80, no. 4, (October 2023)
- “Afterword,” with Sarah Haley, Scenes of Subjection: Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Second Edition, by Saidiya Hartman (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022)
- “Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives,” English Language Notes 59:1 April 2021): 229-231.
- “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) 25 (1 (64)): 167–174.
- “‘Attending to Black Death:’ Black Women’s Bodies in the Archive and the Afterlife of Captivity—A Reflection,” Special Issue “Citation,” Diacritics 48: 3 (2020): 116-129.
- Scarlet and Black Vol. 3: Making Black Lives Matter at Rutgers 1945-2007 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021) co-edited with Miya Carey and Deborah Gray White
- Scarlet and Black Vol. 2: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020) co-edited with Kendra Boyd and Deborah Gray White
- Scarlet and Black Vol. I: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016) co-edited with Deborah Gray White
- “Introduction,” Special Issue “Slavery and the Archive,” History of the Present co- edited with Brian Connolly 6:2 (November 2016): 105-215.
- Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
RECENT HONORS/AWARDS:
- 2024: Elected member, American Antiquarian Society
- 2023: Elected Fellow, Society of American Historians
- 2018-: Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians
- 2017: Special Achievement Award for Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, The Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes, Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Rutgers University
- 2017: Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize, Association of Black Women Historians
- 2017: Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize, Caribbean Studies Association
- 2017: Berkshires Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize
RECENT FELLOWSHIPS:
- 2024-2025: Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Historical Studies, Princeton, NJ
- 2024-2025: Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellowship, Huntington Library (Declined)
- 2020-2021: Barra Sabbatical Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2020: Library Company of Philadelphia, NEH Postdoctoral Fellow (Postponed to Spring 2022)
- 2020: Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK
- 2013-2014: Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
- 2012-2013: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship
