Professor of African American Literature and Comparative Literature
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Washington University in Saint Louis, 2001
M.A. in Comparative Literature, Washington University in Saint Louis, 1996
M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration, Ohio University, 1992
B.A. in French Literature and Language, Ohio University, 1987
Bio
Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she researches and teaches courses on Black thought and literary cultures. She is the author of Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature (SUNY, 2014), co-editor of Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy (SUNY, 2014), and editor of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (Barnes & Noble, 2005). She has also published numerous articles on W.E.B. Du Bois. Her monograph, Understanding Natasha Trethewey, will appear from the University of South Carolina Press in 2025. She was a 2020-2023 Du Bois-Mellon Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and was the Fall 2020 Johnson Family Fellow at the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities. A finalist for the 2021 Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin, in Fall 2022 she was named Faculty Fellow at the UNC Institute for African American Research. Her current work-in-progress, The Thinker as Poet: The Poetry and Po/Ethics of W.E.B. Du Bois, was awarded the Spring 2024 Camargo Foundation Prize and Residency in Cassis, France.
Publications:
- The Thinker as Poet: The Poetics and Poethics of W.E.B. Du Bois (in progress)Understanding Natasha Trethewey (forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press, 2025)
- Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature (SUNY 2014)
- Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy (SUNY 2014)
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Barnes & Noble 2005)
Courses Taught:
UNDERGRADUATE
- Comparative Literature 132: “Identity in the African Diaspora”
- Comparative Literature 251: “Introduction to Literary Theory”
- English/FYS 086: “The Cities of Modernism” (First Year Seminar)
- English 128: “Great American Authors”
- English 129: “Literature and Cultural Diversity”
- English 143: “Film and Culture”
- English 261: “Introduction to Literary Criticism”
- English 265: “#BlackLivesMatter and the New Humanism”
- English 293: “African American Autobiography”
- English 367: “African American Literature to 1930”
- English 368: “African American Literature 1930 to 1970”
- English 369: “African American Literature from 1970 to present”
- English 472: “Major American Authors: W.E.B. Du Bois”
GRADUATE
- English 184: “African American Fiction and Poetry: Metaphor” (Graduate and Advanced Undergraduate Seminar)
- English 785: Graduate Proseminar in African American Literature. Co-taught with Professor Trudier Harris
- English 861: “Poetics and Aesthetics in African American Literature.”
- English 868: “Race and Philosophy in African American Literature”
- English 871: “The Third Space of the Text”
- English 872: “Being and Race in African American Literature”
- English 990: “Black Queer Theory”