Simone Alexander

Professor

Director, Africana Studies

610.758.5208

sia224@lehigh.edu

0035 - Drown Hall

Education:

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

M.A., Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

M.A. & B.A, Philology, Universitet Druzby Narodof, Moscow

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Research Areas

Additional Interests

Transnational Feminist Theories
Caribbean and Black Diaspora Studies
Indo-Caribbean Literature
Francophone Literature
African, African-American and American Studies
Migration and Diaspora Studies
Afro-Russian Studies
Health Humanities and Disability Studies

Research Statement

Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. She is the author of the award-winning monograph, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship  (University Press of Florida, 2014; reprinted 2016), which also received Honorable Mention by the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award. Alexander is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press) and coeditor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press).

Her work has been published in Journal of West Indian Literature, L’Espirit Créateur, African American Review, MLA Approaches to Teaching Gaines: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Work (Modern Language Association), Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, African Literature Today, Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal and edited collections.

Her current book projects include Bodies of (In)Difference: Intimacy, Desirability and the Politics and ‘Poetics of Relation’ and Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions, and the edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Colson Whitehead (Cambridge University Press).

Biography

A native of Guyana, Professor Simone A. James Alexander was awarded a scholarship to study abroad in Moscow, Russia. After a six-year stint in Russia, she continued her education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she completed a second master’s and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Upon receiving her Ph.D., she began her first tenure-track job at Pratt Institute, New York, where she worked for a couple of years before moving to Seton Hall University, New Jersey. At Seton Hall University, Professor Alexander taught in both the English department and Africana Studies and served as both Chair and Director of Africana Studies. She was an affiliate member of the Women and Gender Studies and the Russian and East European Studies Programs. Professor Alexander is currently a Professor of English at Lehigh University and the Director of Africana Studies.

Scholarship

Books:

Simone A. James Alexander, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship  (University Press of Florida, 2014; reprinted 2016).

Dorsía Smith Silva, and Simone A. James Alexander, eds. Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press, 2013).

Simone A. James Alexander, Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001).

African Diasporic Women's Narratives Book Cover

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“What is Florida to Me? Shadowing, Danticat and the Florida/Black Imaginary.” Black Hibiscus: African Americans and the Florida Imaginary, ed. John Wharton Lowe. University of Mississippi Press, 2024. 206-224.

“Feminist Interventions and Discursive and Poetic Practices in Pamela Mordecai’s Poems.” Journal of West Indian Literature. 31.2 (April 2023): 72-93.

“Glissantian Dis/Entanglements and Dis/Engagements: Maryse Condé’s and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Narratives of Af/Filiation.” L’Espirit Créateur: Special Issue: His Legacy Relates: Edouard Glissant’s Thought in Literature and Culture. 61.3 (Fall 2021): 125-142.

“Mapping Diasporic and Transnational Subjectivities: Edwidge Danticat’s Politics of Exile and Home/Comings.” Transnational Africana Women’s Fictions, ed. Cheryl Sterling. London: Routledge, 2021. 32-49.

“Losing Your (M)Other: Edwidge Danticat’s Narratives of Un/Belonging and Un/Dying.” Bloomsburg Companion to Edwidge Danticat, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre. Bloomsburg Publishing, 2021. 99-120.

“Caribbean Feminist Criticism: Towards a New Canon of Caribbean Feminist Theory and Theorizing.” Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970s-2015, ed. Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell. Cambridge University Press, 2021. 183-200.

“Reimagining the Nation: Gender and Bodily Transgressions in Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, ed. Myriam Moïse and Fred Réno. New York: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2020. 219-239.

“On His Own Two Feet:” Teaching Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Through Racial History.” Approaches to Teaching Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works, ed. John Lowe and Herman Beavers. New York: Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), 2019. 18-34.

“From the Street to the World of Art”: Writing Women’s Liberation in Nawal El Saadawi’s Zeina.” African Literature Today 36 (November 2018): 188-211.

“Postcolonial Hauntings: Ghostly Presence in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 19 (Summer 2018): 107-130.

“M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” African American Review 43.3 (fall 2011): 373-390.

“Embodied Subjects: Policing and Politicking the (Black) Female Body.” Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and Modernities. Ed. Violet Johnson and Isabel Soto. Münster: LIT Verlag & East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 2011. 251-267.

“‘Two Bo-Rat Can’t Live in the Same Hole’: Revis(ion)ing Indo-Caribbean Female Subjectivity in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge.” Les Carnets du Cerpac 9. India and the Indian Diasporic Imagination, eds. Rita Christian and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011. 265-290.

“Unveiling the Mind: Nawal El Saadawi’s Politics of Location and Identity.” Emerging Perspectives on Nawal El Saadawi. Eds. Ernest N. Emenyonu and Maureen N. Eke. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2010. 35-48.

“Engendering Home, Engendering Difference: Performing and Representing Blackness in (Communist) Russia.” Russian-American Ties: African American and Russia. Eds. Yuri P. Tretyakov and Elena M. Apenko. St. Petersburg, Russia: Nauka Press, 2009. 114-133.