Caribbean Studies Faculty
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Indira Karamcheti
Associate Professor of American Studies
Indira Karamcheti's work focusses on the South Asian Diaspora, Caribbean Studies, translation, children's literature, and cultural geography. Her scholarship and teaching raise questions of authority: literary, cultural, ethnic/racial, geographic, personal. Articles such as "The Graves of Academe" and "Caliban in the Classroom" explore the question of literary canonization and the bases for the pedagogical authority of the minority teacher. Classes such as "Prizing the Book" and "The Nobel Writers" bring these issues to the attention of students in the classroom.
Current projects include oral histories of South Asians who immigrated to the U.S. between 1945 and 1965, the era of the “Barred Zones” and the Cold War; and translations of Aimé Césaire's Toussaint Louverture and Raphaël Confiant's La Panse du chacal. Her longstanding interest in the South Asian diaspora is reflected in archival research on the French Imperial use of South Asian indentured labor in the Caribbean sugar plantations of Martinique.
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Rashida Shaw McMahon
Associate Professor in English
Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon is an Associate Professor in English and an affiliated faculty in African American Studies and Theater at Wesleyan University. Her course offerings and research exemplify interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborative approaches towards examining: the dramatic and performance traditions of African Americans and the larger African Diaspora; American drama; American musical theatre; American and European theatre and performance histories; theatrical spectatorship; dramatic adaptations of poetry, novels, and historical fiction; and, the application of critical race theories, gender theories, sexuality theories, and popular culture theories to drama and performance. Her book, The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, March 2020), examines “Chitlin Circuit” theatrical productions and the reception practices of African American spectators. Professor Shaw McMahon’s scholarship has appeared in various print and online journals, such as E-misfèrica, in media res: a media commons project, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Research International as well as in edited anthologies on race, performance, media, musical theatre, and sociology, including The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (The University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Black Theater is Black Life: An Oral History of Theater and Dance in Chicago, 1970-2010 (Northwestern University Press, 2013), and Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America (Routledge, 2011). Her interviews with playwrights and actors of “Chitlin Circuit” Theatre have been published by Time Out Chicago magazine. She has been consulted as an expert in African American theatre and drama by journalists from the Kansas City Star and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her current projects include an investigation into the public exhibition of children from the Danish West Indies (referred to today as the United States Virgin Islands) in early twentieth century Denmark, investigations into the hypervisibility of African American women characters within the plays of August Wilson, and examinations of the politics of Black pleasure and Black joy as presented within African American drama and performance.
Professor Shaw McMahon is originally from the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She is a Wesleyan alumna, class of '99, who majored in Theater (with a concentratron in Acting) and Sociology. Her Wesleyan honors BA thesis in Theater is entitled Color Aware enough to be Color-blind: A look at Color-blind Casting from the Perspective of the Black Actor. After Wesleyan, she attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where she received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama. Her dissertation, entitled Theatrical Events and African American Audiences: A Study of Contemporary "Chitlin Circuit" Theatre, examines Chitlin Circuit (a.k.a. Gospel Musical) theatrical productions and the reception practices of African American spectators through interdisciplinary methods of research that span across theatre, performance studies, sociology, film and dance studies. She is a member of the American Society of Theatre Research (ASTR), the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the Black Theatre Association (BTA), and the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR). In 2016, she was awarded the Mellon Mays Mentor of the Year Award at Wesleyan.
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Ren Ellis Neyra
Associate Professor of English
Professor Ellis Neyra writes and teaches in the field of Caribbean literary studies (focusing especially on poetry, music, cinema, as well as literary and critical theory). Ellis Neyra is as interested in the possibilities for thought that emerge when reading texts closely and slowly as in quandaries, impasses, and impossibilities that emerge at the limits of reading. Ellis Neyra has additional interests in deconstruction, Third Cinema, Cine Imperfecto, and translation. Currently, Ellis Neyra is the Coordinator of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate. One can read Ellis Neyra's work in Caribbean Studies in their book The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (Duke University Press, 2020) and in journals such as Small Axe, Radical History Review, La Habana Elegante, and differences, among other venues. While Ellis Neyra's priorities are research and scholarly writing, they also think via poems and, sometimes, art writing and have published such in the U.S., Cuba, and Puerto Rico. -
Paula Park
Associate Professor of Spanish
Paula Park's research and teaching interests are Latin American literature/culture and Philippine literature in Spanish and English from the twentieth century. She focuses on exile writers, Orientalism, Asian diasporas, and transpacific studies. Her articles have been published in Hispanic Review, Hispanófila, Symploke, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, Iberoromania, and Transmodernity, among others. She also has book chapters on Cuban writers Severo Sarduy and Daína Chaviano in the edited volumes (2014) and Critical Insights: Contemporary Latin American Fiction (2017). Park's Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898-1964 (U of Pittsburgh P 2022) reexamines the geographically bound and politically charged definitions of Latinidad and Hispanidad by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin American writers, cultural critics, and diplomats. Her current research project focuses on Latin American and Caribbean literature and diplomatic archives on the Pacific. -
Zaira Simone-Thompson
Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Zaira Simone-Thompson is an assistant professor in the African American Studies department. As a geographer, her work and teaching centers on contemporary experiences and representations of slavery, colonialism and uneven development in the Caribbean. Her past work examined the symbolic and material forces of reparative claims in Barbados—a small but politically large landscape. Her current book project explores the multiplicity of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean visions of recovery, wholeness, and justice relating to the geographic realities of chattel slavery, indentureship and colonialism.
Zaira Simone-Thompson is also the co-coordinator of the Caribbean Studies Minor here at Wesleyan University.
Zaira embraces teaching as a form of active engagement and encourages students to approach the course material as a political “toolbox” and more importantly to show up as their most authentic selves.