Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Africana studies
Marsha Jean-Charles is interested in transnational literary studies of black women's bildungsroman and immigration novels. She endeavors to research the cosmologies and revolutionary politics aroused from forced migration and statelessness. A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her undergraduate thesis, titled "Of Griottes & Pantomimes," is a work elucidating the place of Black feminisms in the novels of Edwidge Danticat. In her master's thesis, titled "Embodying Goddesses: Edwidge Danticat's Literary Revolution," she mixes historical narratives and two of Danticat's short stories to include the voices of revolutionary women in Haiti's war for independence. An organizer at her core, she wishes to fuse her academic work with her activist work and expand understandings of the uses of literary and performance art as tools for activism. Jean-Charles has a B.A. from Wesleyan University (2011), and an M.A. from Columbia University (2014).