CV-Mordecai current

Highlights:

Professional Appointments

2014-present Associate Professor, English, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Primary teaching and research area: Caribbean literature. Secondary areas: African Diaspora literature, multicultural literature of the Americas

Education

2007  Ph.D., English, University of Minnesota

Current book project

A study of Caribbean family sagas tentatively titled “No Ancestry Except the Black Water” (a quote from Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return).

Recent Publications

Book chapter on Maryse Condé’s family sagas forthcoming in Cambridge University Press volume on Literature and Diaspora, ed. Angela Naimou.

“Heroes, Mothers, and Muses: Teaching Gender in Kamau Brathwaite.” Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 30 No. 2 (April 2022): 127-43.

“Scenes of (un)Making: Caribbean Women’s Textile/Textual Practice.” sx salon 36 (February 2021); appeared within a special issue I edited on Caribbean Texts and Textiles.

“Genealogy.” Keywords for Caribbean Studies. http://caribbeandigitalnyc.net/keywords/2020/11/17/genealogy/ December 2020.

“Reading the Jamaican 1970s as Political Thriller: Lessons from Pop Fiction.” Small Axe 58 (March 2019): 62-76.

“The Pathology of Sex and the Domestication of Desire in Zee Edgell’s In Times Like These.” Sargasso 2016-17, I&II (Sept 2018): 63-74.

Recent Conference Papers

Invited panelist, “Celebrating Literary Publications of the Caribbean,” sponsored by Caribbean InTransit. Zoom/Facebook Live, 15 December 2021.

“Biological and Narrative Reproduction in the Family-Saga Novels of Maryse Condé.” Caribbean Studies Association conference, University of Guyana, Georgetown (virtual). 3 June 2021.

Invited panelist, Caribbean Symposium, University of Connecticut, Hartford Campus, 17 May 2019. Paper title: “Caribbean Family Sagas and the Critique of Genealogy.”

“Caribbean Women’s Textile/Textual Practices as Archives of Memory and Mourning.” West Indian Literature Conference, University of Miami, 5 October 2018.

“Genealogy and Epistemological Uncertainty in Caribbean Family Sagas.” Caribbean Studies Association Conference, Havana, 5 June 2018.

“Of Wildness and Witches: Gendered Embodiment in Land of Love and Drowning.” West Indian Literature Conference, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, 6 October 2017.