Fiona Maurissette
Visiting Lecturer in the Writing Program
Black speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, Black feminism, representations of Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, and Black freedom practices
Fiona Maurissette is a Visiting Lecturer in the Writing Program. After graduating from Wellesley and completing the NYC Teaching Fellows Program, Fiona completed her doctorate in English Literature at Tufts University. Her research interests include Black speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, intersectional feminism, Haiti, Black diasporic freedom practices, and maroonage.
She enjoys movies, rollerskating, soccer with her toddler, and yoga.
Currently teaching
Black Feminism and the Future
WRIT178
In this course, we will examine Black feminist essays and speculative fiction as resources for thinking about the future of feminism and its impact on the broader culture. These texts are helping to shift paradigms of what is understood by the term “feminism”. They also contain critical information that students need not just to survive but thrive in the future. We will discuss how these works offer new ways to think about kinship, gender, reproductive rights, abolition, and representations of selfhood. In addition, they will provide a springboard for looking inward to our own lives and perspectives, as we explore how writing, reading, and action are influenced by the personal. Indeed, if the “personal is political,” as Audre Lorde aptly stated, then what we write from our own experience can shape and change our world.
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Black Women Writers
AFR212
The Black woman writer's efforts to shape images of herself as Black, as women, and as an artist. The problem of literary authority for the Black woman writer, criteria for a Black woman's literary tradition, and the relation of Black feminism or "womanism" to the articulation of a distinctively Black and female literary aesthetic. (AFR 212 and ENG 279 are cross-listed courses.)