Jocelyn Stitt

My research lies at the intersection of gender, Caribbean, and archival studies. My interests also include kinship studies, autobiography studies, and digital self-fashioning. My book Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing (2021) is part of Rutgers University’s Critical Caribbean Studies series. The project examines how the unfulfilled promise of postcolonial historical recovery (in the form of archival absence of narratives and records about women’s lives) itself becomes a generative site for feminist epistemologies in contemporary Caribbean women’s research and life writing. My work has appeared in journals such as Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Ariel: A Review of International Literature, The Journal of West Indian Literature, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. I edited Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse (2010) and Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain (2008).
 
I continue to explore issues related to location, ancestry, and archives in my new project, “Digital Genealogies: Race, Place, and Kinship in the Americas.” “Digital Genealogies” examines how Afro- and Indo-Caribbean people use digital tools including social media to explore the relationship between DNA testing, oral histories, and the politics of place and identity. I have received support for this project in 2022 from the NEH Engaging Geography in the Humanities Summer Institute.
 
Pronouns: she/her/hers