Sarah Quesada
Assistant Professor of English
Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies;
Faculty Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies;
Concurrent in Africana Studies, Romance Languages, Gender Studies.
Specialties: Latino and Latin American Literature; Atlantic World Studies; Literature of the Global South (West African and Caribbean); Critical Race Studies; Afro-Latino and African Diaspora studies.
Degrees: PhD, Stanford University
Sarah M. Quesada is a comparatist, and her interdisciplinary and multilingual research draws from the fields of the Atlantic World, African Diaspora studies, and World Literature, applied to Latin American, Latino, and Francophone literatures. Applying heritage site fieldwork in West Africa to literary criticism, her scholarship engages 20th and 21st century Latino and Latin American texts with early modern treatises on West and Central Africa and modern African literatures to propose a re-cartography of South-Atlantic frameworks and Global South political solidarities. Her current book project, Atlantic Borderlands: UNESCO Slave Routes, Textual Memorials, and Latino-Atlantic Literatures addresses the mutually constitutive nature of narrative and heritage tourism. Her courses often revisit Atlantic historiography, including the era of the Slave Trade, the 19th century “scramble for Africa,” 20th century Black internationalism, and contemporary forms of neoliberalization.
Quesada is devoted to the interdisciplinary training of scholars. Hailing from Mexico, she engages in the comparative study of texts in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese and advocates for the empirical integration of fieldwork and archival research to the study of literature, which she addressed most recently in the Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies (OUP 2020). She has previously held positions as a US Multi-Ethnic studies Postdoctoral scholar in the department of Latina/Latino Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and as a 2015-2016 American Council of Learned Societies Andrew Mellon fellow. She recently served as the co-chair for the Latino section of the flagship convention, the Latin America Studies Association (LASA).
Courses
“Race and Memory in the Americas” (ENGL 40928/ ILS 40314)
“Towards an Us: The Decolonial Imaginary” (ENGL 90728)
“Pícaras and Outlaws: Tales of Latina Feminism” (ENGL 40913/ILS 40316/ GSC 40524)
“Modern Latin American Literature and Culture” (ROSP 30310)
“The Extraordinary Americas: “Magic” and Reality in 20th and 21st-Century Latina/o and Latin-American Literature” (ENGL 13186-13)
“Introduction to Literary Studies” (ENGL 30301)
Recent Publications
- “Revisiting the Congo in the Chicano Southwest: The Atlantic Imaginary in Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya,” Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
- “El corpus poético de un ‘Afro-Caribe nerudiano’ de Canto general a Canción de gesta”/ “The Poetic Corpus of a Nerudian ‘Afro-Caribbean’ from Canto general to Canción de gesta.” Afro-Hispanic Review 37.1 (2018). Forthcoming.
- “A Planetary Warning?: A Multilayered Caribbean Zombie in Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro.’” Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination. Hana, Monica, Jennifer Hartford-Vargas & José David Saldívar. Eds. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
- “An Inclusive ‘Black Atlantic: Revisiting Creole Formations in the Atlantic World.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, LACES 10.2 (2015): 226-246.
- “A Conversation with Poet Georgina Herrera. Her Beginnings, the Slave Trade, and Aspects of Race and Gender in Cuba/Una conversación con la poeta, Georgina Herrera. Sus comienzos, la trata esclavista, cuestiones de raza y la género en Cuba.” Afro-Hispanic Review 33.2 (2015).
- “Los ideales políticos-sociales de Michel-Rolph Trouillot y sus aportes crítico-históricos a la literatura.” Journal of Haitian Studies 19.2 (2013).
- “Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, by José David Saldívar” Postcolonial Text 8.3 & 4 (2013). Web. January 2013.
- “Puentes verticales y horizontales a través de las Américas hemisféricas.” UNAM Punto en línea 44 (2013).
- “Georgina Herrera’s poems, ‘Africa,’ ‘Listening to old Oweni speak,’ ‘The Lady from Nigeria.’ Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation 11 (2013): 114-126.
- “Gloria Rolando, Revalorizando la memoria a través de los protagonistas de la historia.” Nuevo Texto Crítico 42 (2012): 187-202.
Contact Information:
213 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-3817
squesada@nd.edu
Postal Address:
Department of English
233 Decio Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556