Research Interests: Twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean literature; Black women writers; race and gender theory; the intellectual in literature

Alisa Braithwaite joined the MIT faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor of Literature. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard in the spring of 2006, and her BA with High Honors from Barnard College in 1998. She spent her final year of dissertation writing at Northeastern University as a Northeast Consortium Dissertation Scholar. She is originally from New York.

Braithwaite's research focuses on the works of Anglophone Caribbean women writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge and Michelle Cliff. Her dissertation explored how these women used their novels to depict the process of a black woman becoming a critical reader and a revolutionary writer, and how these novels act as critiques of the patriarchal and neo-colonial norms that have attempted to inhibit the development of the black woman as artist and intellectual. Her present work continues her interest in the black woman as artist/intellectual. She is currently investigating the works of Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, examining the ways in which these writers reshape conventional notions of cosmopolitanism.

21L.003 Reading Fiction

21L.007 World Literatures

21L.512 American Authors: Sex and the City