Belinda Edmondson

Belinda Edmondson is the author of Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2022), Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Cornell University Press 2009), Making Men (Duke University Press 1999) and the editor of Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation (University of Virginia Press 1999).  She has been the recipient of several fellowships, among these the Hutchins Fellowship at Harvard University, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship; the Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University; and the Mellon Fellowship, among others.  She is an elected member of the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. 

Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean literature; African diaspora literatures; African diaspora cultural studies; gender studies; migration in literature and film

Edmondson is co-organizer of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar: Natives and Nativists, Migrants, and Immigrants in an American City, a 24-month seminar series at Rutgers-Newark that examines the past, present, and future of Newark, aimed at exploring processes of immigration, urbanization, and racialization in the United States and beyond.

Publications:

• “The Importance of Being (In)Authentic.” Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism 72 (November 2023): 254 – 262.

• Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• March 21, 2023. Department of Literary Studies, The New School for Social Research.

Accomplishments:

• Principal Investigator, Sawyer Seminar, Natives and Nativists, Migrants and Immigrants in an American City, 2022-2023, Rutgers-Newark

Upcoming Projects:

• Black Dickens: Henry Garland Murray, A Life (biography)

• Introduction, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, Penguin Classics Edition, forthcoming 2025.

As a scholar of literary history much of my research focuses on uncovering erased, diminished or distorted histories of Black and Brown authors and performers.

The Mellon Foundation awarded a $225,000 grant to Rutgers University—Newark to support a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. The 2022-2023 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Natives and Nativists, Migrants and Immigrants in an American City,” draws together prominent scholars, activists, and educators to trace the origins of today’s anti-Asian hate, grapple with its continuing legacies, and envision ways to fight it in the present moment.

The seminar series is organized by Belinda Edmondson, ISGRJ Senior Faculty Fellow and Professor of African American and African Studies, Kornel Chang, Associate Professor in History and American Studies, and Sean Mitchell, associate professor in Sociology and Anthropology, and  featured events during the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters. 

https://sawyerseminar.rutgers.edu/