Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and associate professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University. She conducts research and teaches courses on race, gender, and citizenship in France, the Caribbean, and Africa. Her areas of expertise include Black women’s writings, anticolonial activism, and slavery in the French Atlantic. Her work centers marginalized voices and shows how their contributions can offer us new ways to think about contemporary cultural and political questions.

She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020), published in France as Imaginer la libération: Des femmes noires face à l’empire (Éditions Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023). She is also the coeditor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her new project, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World (under contract), examines what writings by enslaved children can teach us about history and narrative. Her work has been supported by awards from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and others. Her research has been featured in public venues including Al Jazeera, France Culture, HuffPost, Radio France Internationale, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Selected Publications

• Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. “Beyond Tragedy Black Girlhood in Marlon James’s the Book of Night Women and Evelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme.” Meridians 21, no. 1 (April 2022): 49–72.
• Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. “World War II and the Rise of Feminism in Martinique.” French Colonial History 20 (May 2021): 99–118.
• Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
• Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. “‘Ce pays est un volcan’: Saint-Pierre and the Language of Loss in White Creole Women’s Narratives.” Women in French Studies 25, no. 1 (2017): 13–28.
• Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. “Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Césaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 20, no. 2 (July 2016): 1–13.