Faculty Advisors
Dr. Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Professor of English
Sandra Pouchet Paquet (Ph.D., Connecticut, 1977) is Professor of English at the University of Miami and the major faculty advisor in Caribbean Literary Studies. She teaches in the fields of Caribbean Literature, African-American Literature, and Women's Studies. She is the author of The Novels of George Lamming (1982), Caribbean Autobiography (2002), and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). She has published numerous book and journal articles in Caribbean and African-American Literature, was guest editor of special issues of Callaloo ( "Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean" 1997), and Journal of West Indian Literature (Volume 8, Number 1: October 1998 and Volume 8, Number 2: April 1999). She was Director of the pioneering Caribbean Writers' Summer Institute at the University of Miami (1992-1996).
View her CV
Jamaican Painter Milton Messam (2001)
Images used with the permission of the Gallery of West Indian Art
Dr. Patricia Saunders
Assistant Professor of English
Prof. Saunders is an assistant professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. Her work has appeared in The Bucknell Review, Calabash, Plantation Society in the Americas and Small Axe. She is currently completing a manuscript titled Re-Patri-nation: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity. Her manuscript traces the emergence of literary nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean and maps its transformations through discourses of exile, national and sexual identity, and Diaspora race politics in three cultural and political contexts: pre-independence Trinidad, post-independence Britain and the Civil rights era in the United States. Other works in progress include an edited collection of essays on Jamaican popular culture.
Affiliated Faculty Members
Dr. Lillian Manzor
Associate Professor of Foreign Languages & Literatures
Dr. Lillian Manzor (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1988) is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures. She teaches Latin American and Latino/a literatures and cultures, and Women's Studies with a focus on the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is the author of Borges/Escher, CoBrA/Cobra: Un encuentro posmoderno (1996) and Latinas on Stage (2000). She is currently finishing a book Marginality Beyond Return: Gender, Racial and Linguistic Politics in U.S.-Cuban Theater. She is advisor of the theater group La Ma Teodora and co-directed Miami's first International Monologue/Performance Festival (April 2001).
Dr. Tim Watson
Assistant Professor of English
Timothy P. Watson teaches and works in the areas of 19th- and 20th-century literature in English from Britain, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa. His first book is Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is the editor of a new edition of Cynric Williams' Hamel, the Obeah Man (originally published in 1827; forthcoming from Broadview Press). His current research project is on the transatlantic 1950s, The Sun Also Sets: Transatlantic Culture at the End of the British Empire. He is cofounder and co-convenor of the Atlantic Studies group at UM, and he is the North American reviews editor for the journal Postcolonial Studies.
Back to topScholars
Ligia Aldana
Ligia Aldana is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.
Marjorie Brooks-Jones
Lara Cahill
Lara Cahill is a doctoral student in the Department of English. Her research includes the intersections between literature and geography, environmental criticism, processes of transculturation, and Cuban zarzuela.
B.A. in English and Spanish, Virginia Tech, 2000; M.A. English in English, University of Miami , 2005
Anna-Bo Chung
Anna-Bo Chung is currently pursuing a JD at the Florida International University College of Law.
B.A. in English and Psychology , University of Miami, 2002; MA in English, University of Miami, 2005
Jessica Damian
Conference co-coordinator 2005, Editorial Board, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Jessica Damián is an Assistant Professor and founding faculty member in English at Georgia Gwinnett College . Jessica’s book-length project deals with British women writers, mining, and the transatlantic connections between nineteenth-century England and pre-revolutionary South America .
Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (2006); M.A. in English with an archives and special collections focus, University of Colorado (1998); B.A. in English, University of Miami (1996).
Current Research Areas: 18th- and 19th-Century British Literature; Caribbean and Latin American Literature; Transatlantic Studies; travel literature; poetics; empire; print culture.
Dissertation Title: “The Lucid Silver and the Glowing Ore : British Women Writers Mine South America , 1770-1860”
Yvette Fuentes, Ph.D.
Conference 2000 co-coordinator
Yvette Fuentes is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. At GVSU she teachesall levels of Spanish language, literature and culture, as well as serves as Faculty Advisor to several student organizations.
B.A. in History, Barry University (1991); M.A. in Latin American and Spanish History
University of Miami (1993); Ph.D. in Spanish, University of Miami (2002).
Current Research Areas: Contemporary Cuban and Cuban-American Literature and Culture, Latin American and Caribbean women's narratives, Feminist theory, Exile and Diaspora Literature and Art, as well as Galician History, Literature and Culture.
Sheri-Marie Harrison
CLS Research Assistant 2004, 2005; Conference coordinator 2005; Managing Editor, Anthurium
Sheri-Marie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UM. Her concentration is on contemporary Caribbean Studies, focusing on the correlations among identity, violence, politics and popular culture.
B.A. in English, University of the West Indies, Mona (2000); M.A. in English, University of Miami (2003).
Current Research Areas: Caribbean popular culture, Film, Feminist and Queer theories and Contemporary Caribbean Literature
Dissertation Title:"Boom Tune a Blow Dem Mind': Jamaican Literature and Musical Aesthetics.
Joanne Hyppolite
Joanne Hyppolite . Her concentration is in African-American and Caribbean Literature. At the University of Miami, she has been a McKnight Doctoral Fellow (1996-2001) and has participated in the Caribbean Writer’s Summer Institute. She is also on the board of Women Writers of Haitian Descent, a nonprofit organization that provides forums for Haiti's literary daughters to connect. She has published two middle-grade novels for children: Seth and Samona which won the 1994 Marguerite DeAngeli prize for New Children's Fiction and Ola Shakes It Up. Her essay, "Dyaspora" appeared In The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora edited by Edwidge Danticat. She has been the recipient of the Ursula Vollenweider Writing Fellowship, and the Haitian Studies Association Achievement Award.
M.A. in English, University of Miami (1996); M.A. in Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (terminal degree -- 1994) ; B.A. in Creative Writing, University of Pennsylvania (1991); Ph.D. University of Miami
Current Research areas: Caribbean Literature and Theory, 19th century African-American Literature, Creative Writing, and African-American Studies.
Dissertation Title: "Everybody's Folk: Constructions of Southern Black Folk Culture in Nineteeth Century Literature and Ethnography."
Lynn Chun Ink, Ph.D.
CLS Co-founder, Conference 2000 co-coordinator
Lynn Ink's work deals particularly with the link between the Pacific and Caribbean regions as constructed by American overseas expansion at the turn of the twentieth century in several island sites, including Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Hawai'i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Using post-colonial theory and feminist analyses, she examines contemporary ethnic American women's literature as responses to a history that continues to define American national identity.
B.A. in English, University of Hawai'i (1990); M.A. in English, University of Miami (1997); Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (2001);
Dissertation title: "Decolonizing the Tropics: Gender and American Imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean"
Joanna Johnson
Joanna Johnson is a Lecturer in the Composition Program at the University of Miami.
M.A. in English, University of Miami (2002)
Nadia Johnson
Current CLS Research Assistant, Conference 2007 coordinator
Nadia Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UM. Her work focuses on the relationship between performative constructions of masculinity and nationalism in post-independent Caribbean literature and popular culture.
B.A. in English, Florida State University (2000); M.A. in English Florida State University (2004)
Current Research Areas: Contemporary Caribbean Literature, Caribbean Popular Culture, Gender Studies, Performance Theory
Dissertation Title: "Modernizing Nationalism: Masculinity and the Performance of Anglophone Caribbean National Identity"
Prudence Layne
CLS Research Assistant 2003, Conference 2003 co-coordinator
Prudence Layne is an Assistant Professor at Elon University.
M.A. in English, Howard University (1999); B.As in English and Political Science, with a minor in Spanish and a specialization in International Relations, Howard University (1996).
Current Research Areas: Caribbean literature, Literary Theory, African-American Literature, hybridity, confinement, and Nationalism.
Dissertation Tittle: "Towards an Erotics of Hybridity: Bodies at the Crossroads of a Nation."
Maria McGarrity, Ph.D.
Maria McGarrity is an Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.
Ph.D. in English, University of Miami, 2001.
Her dissertation is titled, "Washed by the Gulf Stream: the Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature."
Kathryn Morris, Ph.D.
CLS co-founder, Conference 2000 co-coordinator, Research Assistant 2001-2002
Kathryn Morris currently teaches at Ransom Everglades.
B.A., Georgetown University, 1993; M.A., University of Vermont, 1997; Ph.D., University of Miami, 2002
Current Research Areas: include relationships between literature and history, especially in colonial and formerly colonial contexts. Her work has been published in Callaloo (2002).
Debbie-Ann Navarrete
CLS Research Assistant, 2003-2004
Debbie-Ann Navarrete is a doctoral student. Her Master’s thesis: “Ecowomanism: A Beginning” focuses on the connections between communities of color and Nature. Her thesis asserts that ecofeminism, much like its parent movement feminism, does not adequately engage in issues of import to women of color and the communities they inhabit. Additionally, she presents Womanism as a viable means of critically engaging ecocritical concerns.
M.A. in English, University of Florida (2002); B.A. in English, University of Florida (2000).
Current Research Areas: Literature of the African Diaspora; Women’s literature, including womanist and feminist theories; Ecocriticism
Deborah Nester, Ph.D.
Deborah Craig Nester completed her Ph.D. at the University of Miami in 2001. The study examines the writings of women who traveled in the colonial West Indies from 1774 to 1945, specifically focusing on their observations of the marketplace, a location central to the social framework of the region, where women were uniquely empowered through the traditional market practices brought to the islands by African slaves.
Current Research Areas: Travel writing in the Caribbean, especially surrounding the U.S. imperial reach that had its beginnings in the British colonization of North America. Additionally, she broadens her investigation of the figure of the market woman to include fiction, drama, and poetry, and is beginning a major research project on Indo-Caribbean writers who emigrated to Canada.
Ph.D. University of Miami (2001), M.A. University of West Florida (1991), B.S. Florida State University (1975)
Dissertation Title: “Gwine By": Colonial Women’s Travel Literature and the West Indian Marketplace
Kezia Page, Ph.D.
Kezia Page is a member of the faculty at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor. Her work is a socio-cultural analysis of Caribbean migrant and diaspora literature in North America and Britain. It responds to critical movements in Caribbean theory that configure the region as borderless, as a space outside of place.
Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (fall 2002), M.A. in English, University of Miami (1998), B.A. in English, University of the West Indies, Mona (1996)
Dissertation Title: “Kingston 21: Diaspora, Migrancy, and Caribbean Literature”
Javier Reyes
Javier Reyes is a doctoral candidate. His project Javier will explore how the sexual outsider alters and illuminates the postcolonial polemics and language within the Caribbean narrative.
M.A. in English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; B.A. in English, LeMoyne College, Syracuse
Tentative Disseration Title: "Articulating the Sexual Subaltern in the Caribbean Narrative."
Kim Dismont Robinson, Ph.D.
Kim Dismont Robinson is a member of the faculty at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix in the Fall 2003 where she is an assistant professor of English and serves on the editorial board of The Caribbean Writer. She has published work in literary criticism, fiction, and poetry.
Ph.D. in English, University of Miami (2003); M.A. in English with Cultural Studies focus, University of Florida (May 1998); B.A. in English and Africana Studies, Rutgers University (May 1995)
Current Research Areas: Psychoanalysis, spirituality history and memory in Caribbean literature.
Dissertation Title: “Probing the Wound: Re-Membering the Traumatic Landscape of Caribbean Literary Histories”
Carmen Ruiz-Castaneda, Ph.D.
Carmen Ruiz-Castaneda is a doctoral student in the Department of English. Her current research interests include issues of transatlantic migration, the Caribbean diaspora in the United States, and gendered nationalisms.
B.A. in English and Honors, Villanova University, 2004; M.A. in English, University of Miami, 2007.
Andrea Shaw
CLS Research Assistant 2002-2003, Conference 2003 co-coordinator, Managing Editor, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Andrea Shaw is Assistant Director of the Division of Humanities and Assistant Professor of English at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale , Florida .
M.A. in English, Florida International University (1997); B.B.A. in Marketing, Florida International University (1989)
Current Research Area: Representation of the fat black woman’s body in literature of the Black Diaspora
New Book: The Embodiement of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies.