Kerry Sinanan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, English
- MB 2.476
- kerry.sinanan@utsa.edu
Bio
I am Assistant Professor in Transatlantic Literature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. I specialize in the literature and culture of the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black resistance and abolition up to the present. My monograph, “Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents, 1750-1834,” examines the writings in various genres by slave traders and slave owners from the mid-eighteenth century up to British emancipation (1834). I am under contract with Broadview Press to produce a new edition of The History of Mary Prince (1831), due 2023. My second monograph is entitled “Beauty and the Breast: Representations of Women, Motherhood and Breastfeeding in British Slavery 1650-1860”. Drawing on the writings of Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, and Jennifer L. Morgan, I assemble transatlantic sources across digital, historical, literary and visual archives to imagine the hidden histories of enslaved mothers. As an Anti-racist pedagogy practitioner I run regular teach-ins and workshops on undisciplining 18th and 19thc studies and on decolonial curriculum. I am Director of a new Black, Indigenous and Latina/x Studies Concentration in English. I supervise PhD and MA Theses in Black, Caribbean and Indigenous studies, and the global Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A recent book, Austen after 200: New Reading Spaces, offers a range of new, more inclusive approaches to reading Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries.
Research Interests
- Black Atlantic Studies
- Race, Slavery, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Jane Austen, Race and Empire
- Anti-Racist and Decolonial Pedagogies.
