Our Faculty

Background

Mary Grace Albanese’s work centers on transnational American literature, archival theory, and the energy humanities in the long 19th-century. Her first book Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth­Century Haitian and American Literature (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) rethinks traditional narratives of modernity through an excavation of Black diasporic spiritual practices. In this book, she argues that Black women, including Marie Laveau, Sojourner Truth, and Pauline Hopkins, retheorized energy politics as a set of practices premised not on extraction and consumption but instead collective action, spiritual communion, and political labor spanning from the U.S to the Caribbean. Mary Grace’s research has also appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, ESQ, and J19, as well as several edited collections including Haiti and Romanticism (Bloomsbury); the Cambridge History of Haitian Literature; and the Oxford Handbook of Melville. She is currently working on two projects: one addresses alternative archival methodologies in American studies. The other traces the afterlives of the Haitian revolutionary hero Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière.

In addition to her research, Mary Grace works as an advocate for survivors of intimate partner violence and is a state-certified rape crisis counselor. She has collaborated with a number of organizations, including Sanctuary for Families, the Advocacy Center, and Rise-NY.

Mary Grace received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2017. Her research has also received support from Sciences Po, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the New York Council for the Humanities, the Alliance Program, and the Georges Lurcy Trust.

Education

• PhD, MPhil, MA, Columbia University

Research Interests

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

Teaching Interests

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