Britt Rusert

Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and incoming executive editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and was a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Rusert is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Her second monograph, The Afric-American Picture Gallery: Imagining Black Art (1859), is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Another book-length project, The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is under contract with Verso.

Rusert holds a PhD in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.