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University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst

English Department

Faculty Profiles: Rachel Mordecai


Contact Information:
283 Bartlett Hall
UMass
Amherst, MA 0l003
p: 413-545-2975
f: 413-545-3880
mordecai@english.umass.edu

Assistant Professor

Rachel Mordecai has a BA from Brandeis University, an MA from the University of the West Indies, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her primary areas of teaching and research interest are Caribbean literature and African Diaspora literature. Beyond these, her research interests include multicultural American literature; literature and ethnography; and autobiography and testimonio. SShe has published on Peter Tosh’s iterations of black citizenship, Lawrence Scott’s amnesiac white creole women, and figurations of blackness in Margaret Cezair-Thompson and Robert Antoni; she has an essay forthcoming on teaching gender in Kamau Brathwaite. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Tropes of Belonging”: Citizenship and the 1970s in Jamaican Literature, investigates questions of citizenship in the turbulent context of 1970s Jamaica through an examination of literary and other cultural texts.

Courses taught include Introduction to Caribbean Literature; Caribbean Women Writers; Autobiography of the Americas; Pulp Caribbean; Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture; and graduate courses in Caribbean literature and Caribbean cultural theory.