About Me
At the University of Missouri-Columbia I research and teach courses in Caribbean and African Diasporic literary and cultural studies. Originally from Jamaica, I completed my undergraduate degree in English at the University of the West Indies Mona in 2000, and received my PhD from the University of Miami in 2008. I have worked as the Caribbean bibliographer for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. I have also published essays in Anthurium and Modern Fiction Studies. My book Jamaica's Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism was published by The Ohio State University Press in September 2014.
Jamaica's Difficult Subjects offers a model for clarifying the dissonant politics of contemporary Caribbean fiction by tracing a range of difficult subjects across the Caribbean region's literary history. By constructing a lineage between difficult subjects in classic Caribbean texts like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Harder they Come and contemporary writing by Marlon James and Patricia Powell, this book presents a sweeping new history of Caribbean literature and criticism that reconfigures how we understand both past and present writing. Jamaica's Difficult Subjects thus rethinks how sovereignty is imagined, organized, and policed in the postcolonial Caribbean, opening new possibilities for reading multiple generations of Caribbean writing with new eyes.