Faculty Profile

nineteenth-century African American and Transatlantic literature, women’s studies

B.A., Ph.D., California (Berkeley)

Professor Wong is completing a book entitled Fugitive and Foreigner: Cultures of Travel in the Black Atlantic, 1820-1861. A study of African-American and West-Indian slave narratives, the book examines the nineteenth-century literary themes of home and travel within a wider historical context, and pays particular attention to the experience and writings of enslaved women. Among her publications is a 2001 article in Prose Studies examining one such narrative by a West Indian woman named Mary Prince.

Her teaching and research interests include the slave narrative – which she calls “a unique genre of early black expression” – as well as law and literature, American-British transatlantic relations, and women’s studies. She will spend the 2006-2007 academic year as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum. Professor Wong is one of only five junior scholars selected for this fellowship from an international field of almost 200.

Black Literature