About

Marisa J. Fuentes

Marisa J. Fuentes is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She completed her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Fuentes is the author of the award-winning book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), which won book prizes from the Association of Black Women Historians, The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and The Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association. She is also co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I to III (Rutgers University Press, 2016-2021), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (2016).

Fuentes’s most recent publications can be found in The William & Mary Quarterly, Small Axe, English Language Notes, and Diacritics. She is co-author of the “Afterword,” with Sarah Haley in Saidiya Hartman’s Second edition of Scenes of Subjection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022). Her next book, Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, explores the connections between capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.