Scholarship and Biography

Faith Smith is Marta F. Kauffman '78 Professor of African and African American Studies, Professor of English, and Affiliate Faculty in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation, Latin American, Caribbean and Latin Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her research interests are in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora, from the late nineteenth century to the present. She edited Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (2011). Her most recent book is Strolling Through the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2023). Recent articles include: “Bloodcloth: Kinship and Fabric in Caribbean Literary Aesthetics.” Routledge Handbook of Caribbean Studies. Eds. Patricia Noxlolo, Kevon Rhiney, Ronald Cummings. Routledge 2025.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003136743-32/bloodcloth-faith-smith; book review of Rosemary Hennessy’s In the Company of Radical Women and Courtney Thorsson’s The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture. Signs (Spring 2025): 799-804.

https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/733647; and “Standpipes, Chimmeys and Memorialization in the Caribbean,” Victorian Literature and Culture Special Issue on Infrastructure. Eds. Timothy Watson and Zarena Aslami (2024): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/standpipes-chimmeys-and-memorialization-in-the-caribbean/D2C285A51DDDFC361097F0F273093FEB.

She is working on “DreadKin,” a book project on kinship and inheritance in contemporary Caribbean fiction and visual culture.

Honors

Fellowship
Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University , 2022-2023
Fellowship
National Humanities Center (United States, Durham) - NHC, 2002-2003
Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (United States, New Brunswick) - RU, 1997-1998
Mandel Humanities Center Faculty Grant in the Humanities for “Silk Roads and Highways: Imagining ‘China’ in the Caribbean Today”
Brandeis University (United States, Waltham), 2019

Organizational Affiliations

Marta F. Kauffman Chair in African and African American Studies and Professor of English, Department of African and African American Studies, Brandeis University

Marta F. Kauffman Chair in African and African American Studies and Professor of English, Department of English, Brandeis University

Affiliated Faculty, Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University

Affiliated Faculty, Interdepartmental Program in Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies, Brandeis University

Affiliated Faculty, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University

Chair, Department of African and African American Studies, Brandeis University

Education

Duke University
Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A.
University of the West Indies
B.A.