Core Faculty Member

Jean-Baptiste, Shanna

Shanna Jean-Baptiste is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching interests include Francophone West African and Caribbean literatures, particularly Haitian literature; identity formation and gender politics; visual art and music; and Afrofuturist aesthetics in the Francophone world. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: the first one charts a literary history of national belonging and unbelonging and traces a genealogy of anticolonial and anti-imperial discourses in nineteenth-century Haitian literature and history; the second one looks at articulations of futurity and Afrofuturism in the Francophone world.

Education:

Ph.D., Yale University
M.A., Yale University
B.A., City College of New York, CUNY
A.A., Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY 

Fields of Research: 

Afrofuturist aesthetics in the French-speaking world
Nineteenth-century Haitian literature
Caribbean and West African literatures
Identity Formation and Gender politics
Diaspora Studies
Visual Art and Music
Digital Humanities 

Graduate Courses:

Intimacy and Violence in the Haitian Novel
Francophone Afrofuturism 

Undergraduate Courses: 

Francophone Afrofuturism
French Civilization from the Revolution to the Present
Modern French Literature