Jeannine Murray-Román

Demos Fellow

Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Jeannine Murray-Román (PhD Comparative Literature, UCLA) is an Assistant Professor of French and Spanish specializing in comparative Caribbean literatures and cultures in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Her work is grounded in postcolonial, transnational, and performance studies and her research interest in experimental writing includes digital humanities as well as the interface of oral and performance practices and writing in the regions of the archipelagos in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Author of Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2017), her work has appeared in Small Axe, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Feminist Formations. She has forthcoming work on Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera in The New Centennial Review and Taylor Mac’s Decades in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her current work focuses on speculative poesis, figures of partial death in Caribbean writing, and the “debt crisis” in Puerto Rico.

Her research on digital-born writing is featured in Performance and Personhood in “Staceyann Chin and Zoé Valdes: Sexilic Politics in the Blogosphere,” which examines the blogger-commenter relationship as an antiphonal performance dynamic. The article “Twitter’s and @douenislands’s Ambiguous Paths” in sx archipelagos (DOI 10.7916/D8S46S1S) explores the social-mediatization of poetry and art concepts in live-tweeting events and use of the micro-blogging platform’s reverse chronology to amplify the Trinidadian folk figure of the douen, a figure whose feet are on backwards and characteristically leaves backwards traces. Research supported by Demos considers how imagery of mourning and political protest develops on Instagram as indexed by #4645.