Education
Ph.D. 1999, Yale University, American Studies
B.A. 1991, State University of New York at Stony Brook, English with a minor in Philosophy
Research Interests
Caribbean, American, Black Diaspora, Women and Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory and Psychoanalytic Theory
Biographical Information
Professor Stephens is a Professor I in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of English, and the Founding and Executive Director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ). From 2017-2020 she also served as Dean of the Humanities. A practicing psychoanalyst, she is a scholar of American and African diasporic literature and culture. Known for groundbreaking research on Caribbean intellectual and political traditions, Caribbean diasporic visual culture, and the performance of Blackness, her work aims to understand the psychic and social implications of racialized, gendered and sexualized constructions of the human. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014), She also co-edited the special issue of the Radical History Review, “Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora” (Jan 2009) and is co-editor with Brian Russell Roberts of the essay collection, Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture (Duke, 2017); with Tatiana Flores, Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) and Duke, 2017); and with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020). Stephens is also a cultural historian, serving as a consultant and featured scholar in W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, a film directed by Rita Coburn for PBS American Masters; and as a curatorial advisor on exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art in New Jersey and New York city. Professor Stephens’s current projects include a scholarly monograph on Caribbean writers, artists and thinkers and their perspectives on insularity and islandness; and a collection of essays on race and the place of the unthought other in psychoanalytic thought. She is an acclaimed teacher whose courses focus on such topics as race and psychoanalysis, black American writers and cultural producers, Caribbean fiction and short stories, the insular and archipelagic imagination, and black feminist thought across the African diaspora.
Courses Regularly Taught
- Caribbean Literatures in English
- The American Novel in a Global Context
- Race and Sexuality in Caribbean and American Literatures
- Literature of the Colonial Caribbean Atlantic
- Women in Worlds of Color
- 19th Century Literature of the Black Atlantic
- Islands of Empire: Caribbean Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
- New World Literature of the 18th Century
- Race and Psychoanalysis (graduate)
- Archipelagic American Studies (graduate)
Publications
Books
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2005. Black Empire: the Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham: Duke University Press. |  |
2014. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer. Durham: Duke University Press. |
Articles
- March 2015. “New Points of Recognition: Stuart Hall’s Gift to the Study of Blackness.” Small Axe.
- 2013. “Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean.” With Brian Russell Roberts. Journal of Transnational American Studies. Special Forum: American Studies: Caribbean Editio
- July 2013. “What is an Island?”: Caribbean Studies and the Contemporary Visual Artist. Small Axe.
- April 2013. “Gestures Beyond Local Color: A Caribbean Calligraphy: Vladimir Cybil Charlier.” ARC: Art. Recognition. Culture.