About

Marisa J. Fuentes is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the histories of gender, slavery, the Caribbean, and Black Atlantic worlds. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, obtained in 2007, and has been at Rutgers University since 2009, where she is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and an Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Fuentes is the author of the award-winning book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016, which has received multiple prizes from various historical and cultural associations. She is also a co-editor of the volumes Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, and has contributed to the special issue ‘Slavery and the Archive’ in the journal History of the Present. Her research explores the histories of gender, slavery, and the Black Atlantic, with recent publications addressing topics such as the archive of slavery, silence in historical practice, and the afterlife of Black women’s bodies in captivity. Fuentes’s upcoming work, Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives, investigates the connections between capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the disposability of Black lives in the 17th and 18th centuries. She has been elected to the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, and is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for the 2024/2025 academic year.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Political Science
• Archaeology
• Criminology
• Ancient history
• Art history
• Law

Selected publications

• 2. Slavery’s Shadows: The Afterlife of Dispossession

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2025-02-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2023-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This Article Forum extends and amplifies the conversation begun by Sharon Block's innovative article in this issue, "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel: Historical Methods, Historical Justice." Block's article is the initial offering in the <i>William and Mary Quarterly</i>'s "Methods and Practices" section, and SJ Zhang, Christine DeLucia, Marisa J. Fuentes, Lara Putnam, and Martha Hodes engage with Block's work by reflecting on their own research and methods. Block provides a response for the Forum.

  PublisherDOI

• Thavolia Glymph Roundtable

  Civil War history · 2022-01-01

  article

  Thavolia Glymph Roundtable Tamika Nunley (bio), Catherine Clinton (bio), Crystal Feimster (bio), Marisa Fuentes (bio), Gary Gallagher (bio), and Steven Hahn (bio) JIM DOWNS: I'm going to start by introducing this panel and then I'm going to hand it over to Tamika. Although it hasn't been officially announced and it won't be until the fall, I will be the editor of Civil War History, and Crystal Feimster will be the associate editor of the journal. This will be part of our first issue, in March 2022. As editor, I want to underscore interdisciplinary analysis and also emphasize the main contributions of Black people as central actors within the Civil War. When Tamika Nunley approached Crystal and me with the possibility of doing something on Thavolia Glymph for the journal, we thought it was a great idea. Instead of doing a traditional festschrift in which a handful of scholars would each write an article that addressed aspects of Thavolia Glymph's many contributions, we thought the roundtable format would be the most efficacious way of engaging Thavolia's work but also making it accessible to a large audience. Thavolia's scholarship also illustrates our vision to make the journal a place that promotes interdisciplinary studies of the Civil War era. We want to make sure that we're reaching readers in a variety of fields, from cultural studies and African American studies to military history and gender studies. The roundtable format is one way of trying to achieve that and Thavolia's scholarship engages all of these fields and more. I would like to begin with everyone in the Zoom, introducing yourself so we all know each other, and then Tamika will take over. I won't be participating, but I will be observing, if that's okay. Crystal, do you want to start? [End Page 11] CRYSTAL FEIMSTER: I'm Crystal, and it is lovely to see everybody. I am joint in the American studies program and the African American studies department at Yale. I have a secondary appointment in the history department. I am the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching.1 I'm completing a book with Oxford University Press on Civil War Louisiana—titled Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Louisiana. I also have a couple of other projects on Civil War in progress, one on Civil War and prostitution in Kentucky and the other on the Civil War and sexual violence. Of course, my work would not be possible without the work of scholars such as Thavolia Glymph and Catherine Clinton, who carved out a space for me as a women's historian and a Southern historian to enter the conversations on Civil War History. I'm really honored to be part of this conversation. STEVEN HAHN: I'm Steve Hahn, and as of 2017, I've been in the history department at NYU. Thavolia and I have been overlapping in all sorts of ways. I first got to know her through the Freedman and Southern Society Project, where we were both visiting editors. We are currently sort of copresidents of the Southern Historical Association, and we're hoping to be together in New Orleans, in November. Her work has been incredibly important to me, both in terms of her understanding of archives and also her really rich reading of material and her impressive conceptualizations of this incredible event in the middle of the nineteenth century. And I've had the opportunity to teach her mostly Out of the House of Bondage, mostly to graduate students who almost invariably are challenged, and their ideas about the Civil War era are transformed by what she does. I think it's really one of the most important books on this period, and I'm happy to be here. CATHERINE CLINTON: I'm Catherine Clinton, Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas in San Antonio. I'm really excited to be able to think of Thavolia, bringing to life for me, the concept of intersectionality. Barbara Fields always told me that a race was an ideology, and I didn't really believe...

  PublisherDOI

• Genres of History and the Practice of Loss

  Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism · 2021 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Sociology

  This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery’s archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery’s archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.

  PublisherDOI

• A History of Black and Puerto Rican Student Organizing across Rutgers University Campuses, 1950–1985

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2021-05-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Slavery’s Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives

  English Language Notes · 2021-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery’s archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.1 Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”2 The third article, Simon P. Newman’s “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780,” explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and “servant”) men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history.In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery’s archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how we must make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in the midst of this ongoing terror.3 Smallwood, in revisiting “Venus in Two Acts,” reassesses her own book, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate the method of exploring the “counter-factual”—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery’s archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter’s perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to “bottom up” by using an “abundance” of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gave historians “evidence” that enslaved people shaped their environments and families and enacted resistance. However, these data did little to elaborate the social and intimate lives of enslaved people. Smallwood explains, “What is lost in uncritical celebration of the new approach is attention to how it also helped to sediment a theory of historical knowledge production that figured the archive as merely a repository of free-floating empirical facts to be lifted off the page by the researcher.”4 This critique provides the entry point for a closer look at Newman’s article.Newman uses quantitative methods to examine eighteenth-century newspapers from Scotland and England for evidence that legal slavery existed and persisted in the United Kingdom despite the absence of explicit laws. With hundreds of runaway ads (and others for sale) attempting to reclaim people in the language of “property,” Newman argues that slavery existed in the United Kingdom for people of African descent and was distinct from other forms of servitude in the region. More than this, he asserts that the threat of New World slavery—of being sent to the Caribbean plantation system—was ever present, making servitude for Africans and their descendants in the United Kingdom unique among the servant classes. Newman convincingly makes the case that slavery was pervasive in the eighteenth-century United Kingdom. The corpus of runaway ads exposes the violence and surveillance against enslaved people in the region. But we must still ask: What are the consequences of reproducing archival representations of enslaved people as “quantitative data” to prove these points? This method raises larger questions about the disavowal of slavery’s existence in the UK historical guild and the demands for a particular kind of empiricism required to make Black lives visible.Both Hartman and Smallwood call for a crucial encounter with the broader structures of knowledge production and the effects that histories of racial subjugation have on our present. Therefore, why does the historiography deny the existence of slavery in the United Kingdom? Is it because it threatens the “mystique of British anti-racism” that represents Britain as the bastion of abolition activism, liberalism, and multiculturalism?5 Or perhaps it would force a reckoning with the continued marginalization and underrepresentation of Black British scholars in the UK academy?6 In what ways does the disavowal of slavery’s legality in the United Kingdom help the continued denial of the responsibility of the UK to its Black subjects and citizens, many of whom have been part of the state/empire since the time Newman explores if not well before? What would it mean to acknowledge this history? Is there a fear of being made fiscally responsible for its harm and violence?7 Hartman makes plain the unequivocal links between the past and our present conditions—the precarity, incarceration, early death—that make imperative the need to ask questions of the historical guild and society that go beyond the empirical.8 For it matters little what “evidence” one marshals to prove Black existence when Black people have been demanding recognition since their arrival in the western Atlantic world. Following Smallwood, “We might say . . . that what is at issue in the writing of histories of modern racial slavery is not the archive per se, but rather the critical philosophical assumptions that shape and structure our understandings of history.”9

  PublisherDOI

• Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021 · 119 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• "Attending To Black Death:" Black Women's Bodies in the Archive and the Afterlife of Captivity

  diacritics · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  The subjugation of Black lives and their violent disavowal in the archives, from incident reports to grand juries and press conferences, lay bare the lingering consequences of archival power (the archive as authority) and white supremacy. Citation from such documents is revealed as a form of terror. We must recognize our power in resisting this violence. We must also refuse rhetorical and archival violence and the state's power to control the official story. This essay considers the archives of slavery, their afterlives, and the future archives of Black death to track the technologies that colonial and state authorities deploy to obscure their culpability in Black deaths. It thinks about the "politics of citation" not necessarily as an erasure and occlusion of scholarship, but in the context of history as a discipline and the humanities at large, which use the archive as a continued site of authority and reproduce its violence.

  PublisherDOI

• A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, by Brooke N. Newman

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2020-11-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Women, Unfree Labor, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-09-07

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter focuses on various and comparative experiences of different populations of women in unfree labor systems in the early modern Atlantic world, beginning with indigenous women in the Americas who suffered the violent consequences of Spanish conquest. It discusses gendered contexts shaping slavery in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade; and the consequences for unfree and free women in different communities of North America during the period of international trade in human beings. It centers the experience of sexual exploitation inherent in labor systems in which women brokered no power over their bodies and reproductive lives, elucidating the limitations of archives in which women’s perspectives are largely silenced. Efforts at evacuating the lives of marginalized women from the silences in the archives have offered new insights into women’s lives and changed understandings about everyday experience in the early modern Atlantic world.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tamika Y. Nunley

  1 shared

• Gary W. Gallagher

  1 shared

• Crystal Feimster

  1 shared

• Steven Hahn

  1 shared

• Brian Connolly

  1 shared

• Catherine Clinton

  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

  1 shared

• Clarisse Nunes

  Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2005

• M.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2001

• B.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1998

Awards & honors

• Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize (2017)
• Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize (2017)
• Berkshires Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize (…
• Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians…
• Special Achievement Award for Scarlet and Black: Slavery and…