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Kaiama Glover

Professor | Barnard College of Columbia University

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and faculty director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received a BA in French history and literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard University and a PhD in French and romance philology from Columbia University. Her 2010 book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. Her most recent monograph is A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke University Press, 2021). In 2018–2019, she was a resident Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France, where she began work on her current book project, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” as well as a documentary series with the working title “Black Diva Saves the World.” Glover has published articles in The French Review, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and the Journal of Haitian Studies, among others, and has coedited 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 (Liverpool University Press, 2016) and, most recently, The Haiti Reader (Duke University Press, 2020).

Glover has also translated several works of fiction and nonfiction 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). Her translations of Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey and Yanick Lahens’s Sweet Undoings are forthcoming this year and next, respectively. 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 founding coeditor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and founding codirector of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has contributed regularly to the New York Times Book Review and been a host on the PBS program History Detectives: Special Investigations.

Kaiama Glover served on the 2020 Selection Committee for Just Tech’s Covid-19 Rapid Response Grant Competition.


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