Keith Michael Green

Associate Professor of English and Director of the Africana Studies Program

Email

keigreen@camden.rutgers.edu

Area Of Expertise African American literature, Afro-Cuban culture, 19th-century American literature, autobiography, narratives of black captivity, speculative fiction and disability studies

Operational Unit Camden

Department Senior Faculty Fellows

About

Keith Michael Green is a proud alumnus of Camden High, and his research and teaching interests center people of African descent in speculative fiction, captivity narratives, disability studies, and multilingualism. His first book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816-1861 (Alabama, 2015), explored neglected forms of captivity blacks experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century. He also co-edited a collection of essays on bondage and subjection in the contemporary moment, entitled Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019). His current projects explore the meanings of Cuba for blacks in the United States, multilingual African American literary production, as well as the married and religious life of two enslaved persons in colonial New England, Hannah Hovey and Briton Hammon.

Publications & Speaking Engagements

Publications:

Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816–1861 (University of Alabama Press, 2015, recipient of the Elizabeth Agee Prize for “outstanding scholarship in the field of American literary studies”)
Co-editor with Sarada Balagopalan and Cati Coe of Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019)

ISGRJ Project: Black Transnationalism & Amistad Conversations

Research on Black Transnationalism & Amistad Conversations, a series of cross-campus conversations assessing the viability of formalizing a Rutgers University affiliation with the historic Amistad Commission, whose efforts under Stephanie J. Harris will ensure the teaching of Black history in New Jersey schools

Saved but Enslaved: Briton Hammon, Hannah Hovey, and the Earliest Black and Indigenous Members of Plymouth’s First Church, 1708-1783.

2024 Rutgers University Academic Affairs Research Council Grant for the project “Saved but Enslaved: Briton Hammon, Hannah Hovey, and the Earliest Black and Indigenous Members of Plymouth’s First Church, 1708-1783.” The two-year project will contribute to scholarship that shows slavery was indeed present in colonial New England. Through estate and church records, Green will also produce an unprecedented recording of Black and Indigenous membership in the Pilgrims’ founding American church.