Our Faculty

Background

Mary Grace Albanese’s research focuses on transnational literary histories, comparative feminisms and the energy humanities with a particular focus on the Haitian Revolutionary period and its wider reverberations throughout the Americas. She regularly teaches American literature, Caribbean literature and special topics courses ranging from the Gothic to Herman Melville to zombies.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Small Axe, American Literature, J19 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, among other venues. She is the author of Black Women and Energies of Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and has contributed to a number of edited collections. She is currently writing a monograph that examines the intersection of gender expression and revolutionary labor across the United States, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela from 1771 to 1825. She is also collaborating on a translation and scholarly edition of the trial of Marie-Josèphe Angélique of Montréal.

Albanese’s scholarship is deeply informed by community engagement and feminist coalition building. She is a certified New York state rape crisis counselor and is currently collaborating with the Ithaca Doula Access Initiative to sponsor training for BIPOC and Spanish-speaking doulas and expand access to reproductive care in upstate New York. She is also undergoing certification to become a full-spectrum doula.

Unrelated to her research activity, she is currently writing a body horror novel and co-writing a screenplay about Carl Sagan.

Education

• PhD, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 2017
• B.A, Barnard College, Comparative Literature, 2009, summa cum laude

Research Interests

• Literatures of the Americas
• The Haitian Revolution
• Archival Theory

Teaching Interests

• American Literature to 1920
• Revolutionary Ecologies
• All American Zombies