Education
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., UC Santa Cruz
Research Interests
Marisa J. Fuentes’s scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. She teaches courses in the History and Women’s and Gender Studies departments on topics ranging from early modern Caribbean history and women’s and gender history in the United States to feminist theories and methodologies.
She is the author of, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) which won both the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize, the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. Dispossessed Lives illuminates the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth century Bridgetown, Barbados by reading fragments of traditional archival materials “against the bias grain.” The book interrogates the archive and its historical production to challenge the methods and categories by which historians have analyzed slavery in the Atlantic World, in addition to engaging with larger questions of violence, agency, and gender. She has written a number of articles, book chapters, and book reviews, including “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,” which won the Andres Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize. She is also the co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (November 2016). Her next project will explore the connections between capitalism, the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Fuentes’s research has been funded by several institutions including the Ford Foundation, Fulbright IIE Program (Barbados), the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
From 2017-2019, Fuentes will co-direct the “Black Bodies” project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, a weekly seminar that seeks to attend to and address black embodiment, with a particular focus on the many ways in which black bodies have been subject to epistemic, historical, archival, and ‘biopolitical’ praxes of violence and erasure in various times, spaces, and geographies.
Awards, Fellowships, and Grants
- Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians
- Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize (2017), Caribbean Studies Association for Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
- Berkshires Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize (2017) for Dispossessed Lives
- Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2013-2014, Barnard College
- Schomburg Center for Black Culture Scholars-in Residence Fellowship, 2012
- Andrés Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize, Association of Caribbean Historians, 2012
- RCHA Faculty Fellow, Rutgers University, 2010-2011
- Fellow, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 2009-2010
- Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2007-2009
- Ida. B. Jackson Dissertation Fellow, University of California Berkeley, 2006
- Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, 2005
- Fulbright IIE Fellow, Barbados, West Indies, 2003-2004
- Mentored Research Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2002
- Ford Foundation Research Grant, University of California, Berkeley2001
- Graduate Opportunity Summer Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
- Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 1998-2001
Professional Affiliations
- The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
- Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture
- Association of Caribbean Historians
- Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
- American Historical Association