About

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem (she/her) is Professor of English at CUNY (Kingsborough) and a postcolonial, partition, and gender studies scholar. She works on contemporary, historical literatures of Ireland and African America chiefly, specializing in literary texts that represent partition borders—imperial, colonial, carceral, and capitalist. Her research concerns the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence in poetry and narrative; political justice particularly with regard to reparations; and social justice of race and gender. Maureen publishes actively. Her monograph Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian appeared in 2020 from Rowman and Littlefield. In 2021, Routledge, Inc. published two books by Maureen: the monograph Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations and the co-edited collection, The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter. Among other publications, she wrote the journal article “Architecting the Carceral State” which looks at the radical deployment of the fragment in prose works of Walter Benjamin and Medbh McGuckian (RISE 4, 2021). She has two forthcoming books—the edited collection Imperial Debt (Liverpool UP, 2024) and The Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison (2025)—and is writing articles on silence, sleep, and snow in James Joyce’s “The Dead” and on Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, reading it as a partition narrative and critique of late capital. Maureen also writes opinion pieces, appears in interview, and presents at or organizes conferences. She’s currently serving a three-year term on the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR). Before entering academia, she worked in the corporate world while raising her children on her own, Dr. Cynthia Fadem, a geoarchaeologist, and Brooklyn restaurateur Mike Fadem. Maureen lives in Brooklyn. #blacklivesmatter