Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover

Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies,  Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center 

Department

Africana Studies, Digital Humanities Center, French

Office

Milbank 314

Contact

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. Having received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University, Professor Glover joined the faculty in 2002. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan francophone African cinema. She advises students in French, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and Human Rights. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP 2020) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010). She has published articles in The French ReviewSmall AxeResearch in African LiteraturesThe Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others, and has co-edited several works, including New Narratives of Haiti for Transition magazine (2013), Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe (2015), Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine for Yale French Studies (2016); The Haiti Exception (2016), and The Haiti Reader (2020). Professor Glover has translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017), and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (2019). She is an awardee of the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, the founding co-organizer of "The Caribbean Digital," and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual CartographyIn 2018-2019 she was a resident Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France where she began work on her new book project, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and she is also working on a book of essays, "'Blackness' in French."

  • BA, Harvard University
  • DEA, Université de Paris IV, la Sorbonne
  • MA, MPhil, PhD,  Columbia University

  • French Language and Literature
  • Africana Studies
  • Human Rights Studies

Publications

A Regarded Self: “Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (forthcoming with Duke University Press).

Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool University Press, 2010.

The Haiti Reader. Duke University Press (2020) [co-edited with Laurent Dubois, Nadève Ménard, Millery Polyné, and Chantelle Verna].

Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, for Yale French Studies (2016) [co-edited with Alessandra Benedicty].

New Narratives of Haiti, for Transition Magazine No. 111 (2013) [co-edited with Laurent Dubois].

Josephine Baker: a Century in the Spotlight, for the The Scholar and the Feminist Online 6.1-6.2, fall 2007-spring 2008.

Order, Disorder, and Freedom: an Homage to Maryse Condé, for the Romanic Review. Columbia University Press, 2004.

“Confronting the Communal: Maryse Conde’s Challenge to New World Orders in Moi, Tituba,” French Forum 37.3 (in press).

 “‘Black’ Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine: The Case of Marie Vieux Chauvet,” Small Axe17.1 40 (March 2013): 7-21.

 “New Narratives of Haiti, or, How to Empathize with a Zombie,” Small Axe 16.3 39 (November 2012): 199-207.

 “Same Difference: Incoherent Being(s) in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Early Prose Fiction,” The French Review 85.2 (December 2011).

“Tituba’s Fall: Maryse Conde’s Counter-Narrative of the Female Slave Self,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15.1 (January 2011): 99-106.

“Presenting the Past: The Persistence of the Para-Revolutionary Moment in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube Tranquille,” Research in African Literatures 41.4 (November 2010): 208-26.

“The Ambivalent Transnationalism of a Literature World. In French,” Small Axe 33 14.3 (October 2010): 99-110.

“The Consequences of ‘Not-Paris,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.3 (September 2008): 275-88.

“Showing vs. Telling: spiralisme in the light of antillanité,” Journal of Haitian Studies 14.1 (spring 2008): 91-117.

“Exploiting the Undead: the Usefulness of the Zombie Figure in Haitian Literature,” Journal of Haitian Studies 11.2 (fall 2005): 105-121.

In The News

BCRW, the Public Theater, and the Ntozake Shange Literary Trust celebrated the newly created residency with an evening of tributes and performances.

October 19, 2022

The Francophone-Caribbean scholar and lead researcher of a $5 million Mellon Foundation grant and a $40,000 NEH award discusses her inspirations. 

February 28, 2022

The grant will support the work of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective led by
Professor Kaiama L. Glover

February 1, 2022

On campus, an exhibition examines the history of racist housing policies that led to widespread segregation in New York City and across the U.S.

November 8, 2021

From anthropology to neuroscience, Barnard professors were recognized by the American Institute of Architects, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and more.

May 10, 2021