Jenny Sharpe

Professor

sharpe@humnet.ucla.edu

(310) 825-1778

Humanities 256

    Jenny Sharpe is professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching are in colonial and postcolonial studies with a specialization in Caribbean literature, critical theory, and women’s studies. She is author of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minnesota 1993), which analyzes how problems of imperialism are staged in narratives of sexual violence, and Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minnesota 2002), which challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine women’s negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.  She is currently working on “Relocating the Postcolony in an Age of Globalization,” a booklength study that engages current debates on globalization and transnationalism with the objective of placing the rural/urban dynamics of nations within a global frame and bringing the Caribbean as a region into the conceptual framework of the Black Atlantic.  She is on the editorial board of Signs and Jouvert: a journal of postcolonial studies and the Advisory Board for Columbia University Press book series, “Columbia Comparative Studies in Ethnicity and Race.”