About
Maureen Ruprecht Fadem (she/her) is Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough and a postcolonial and gender studies scholar. She works on contemporary Irish literature, from the North mostly, as well as on the global literatures of partition: texts representing histories of the geopolitical (non)solution and illustrating its imperialist, (neo)colonialist, carceral, and (racial)capitalist designs. Her research looks at the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence, at political justice particularly with regard to
longue durée forms, often called “reparations,” and at social justice of race and gender. Maureen’s monograph
Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian was brought out in 2020 by Rowman and Littlefield. In 2021, Routledge, Inc. published two of book projects:
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations, and her co-edited collection
The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter. Along with multiple
Op Eds in Inside Higher Ed, she recently published the journal article “
Architecting the Carceral State,” looking at radical deployments of the fragment in Walter Benjamin and Medbh McGuckian (
RISE 4, 2021), and “‘A thing breaks beyond naming’:
A Review Article on David Lloyd’s 2022 Books, Counterpoetics of Modernity and
The Harm Fields” (
ISR 31.4, 2023). Maureen’s forthcoming research includes two books—the edited collection
Imperial Debt (Liverpool UP, 2024) and
The Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison (2025)—and two new articles, one a comparative look at the circuitous, snowy epistemology of empire in Joyce’s “The Dead,” the other a reading of Mandel’s
Station Eleven as a partition narrative that signals the end of capital. Maureen appears in interview, she organizes and participates in conferences, and recently completed a two-year term on MLA’s committee on Academic Freedom (
CAFPRR). Before entering academia, Maureen managed a twenty-year career in the corporate world while raising her children on her own,
Dr. Cynthia Fadem, a geoarchaeologist, and Brooklyn restaurateur
Mike Fadem. She lives in Brooklyn.
