Britt Rusert, Assistant Professor 
Chief Undergraduate Advisor
325 New Africa House, 545-2751
brusert@afroam.umass.edu
Office Hours: Tues 1:00-2:30 p.m. and by appointment.
Fall 2012 Courses
AfroAm 690P "New Approaches to Early African American Literature"
AfroAm 701 "Major Works in Afro-American Studies I"
Spring 2013 Courses
AfroAm 690E "Blackness and Utopia"
702 "Major Works in Afro-American Studies II"
Brief Bio
Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and graduate certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University in 2009. Her research and teaching fields include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature and culture, American literature of the long nineteenth century, the history of race and science, science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory (especially genealogies of Marxist and feminist thought). She is also interested in race and genomics and science fiction. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Radical Empiricism: Fugitive Science and the Struggle for Emancipation. The book focuses on a set of early black writers and performers who were interested in mobilizing a wide range of popular sciences—including astronomy, phrenology, ethnology, and comparative anatomy—in the struggle against slavery. She is also beginning a second project, which argues that recent developments in biotechnology and genomics are poised to radically transform the study of race and identity within Black Studies. Rusert has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University and the Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy at Duke University.
Publications
In progress:
Book Manuscript: Radical Empiricism: Fugitive Science and the Struggle for Emancipation
“Framing Finance: Rebellion, Dispossession and the Geopolitics of Enclosure in Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon Series,” with Jordana Rosenberg
Articles:
“The Science of Freedom: Counter-Archives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage,” Forthcoming, African American Review, Special Issue on Black Performance
“Types of Mankind: Visualizing Kinship in Afro-Native America,” Forthcoming, Common-place, October 2012
“Grassroots Marketing in a Global Era: More Lessons from BiDil,” with Charmaine D.M. Royal, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 39.1 (Spring 2011): 79-90
“Black Nature: The Question of Race in the Age of Ecology.” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics, Issue Topic: Ecology & Ideology, 22 (September 2010): 149-66.
“‘A Study in Nature’: The Tuskegee Experiments and the New South Laboratory,” Journal of Medical Humanities 30.3 (September 2009): 155-71
Edited:
Co-editor, with Priscilla Wald, Special Issue of American Literature: “Technologies of Enslavement and Liberty” 81.1 (March 2009)