Sarah Quesada

Sarah M. Quesada (PhD Stanford) is a comparatist and an Associate Professor (previously an Andrew Mellon Assistant Professor) in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her main interests are literatures of the Global South—Latin American, Caribbean, and African literatures. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center (NHC), the John E. Sawyer Fellowship, and the Albertine Foundation (French Institute for Culture & Education), among other places.   

Her book The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge Studies in World Literature,2022) won an honorable mention for First Book in 2023 from the Modern Languages Association (MLA). It examines hidden archives of African influence in most widely read Latinx American authors of the last fifty years, through these authors' conjurings of the colonial and imperial eras as well as Cold War internationalism, and the rise of UNESCO heritage tourism. The book has been reviewed in a wide variety of media and scholarly journals.

Her forthcoming book is focused on little-known works and recently revealed archives from regions in Africa and Greater Mexico concerning African revolutionary movements. This project has taken her to explore archives at Oxford University, the French National Archives, the archives of the University of Nairobi, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores in Mexico city, the special collections at Stanford University and the University of Chicago, among other places.  She has recently discussed themes from this project on international French Radio .

Her work has appeared in PMLA, Comparative Literature, Le Monde, African Studies Review, American Quarterly, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Latino Studies, Post-45 Contemporaries, among other places. She is a former co-chair representative for Latino Studies in the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and serves on an executive committee for the Modern Languages Association (MLA). She also serves on the editorial board of Hispanic Review and is the Book Review editor for Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. She holds a secondary appointment at Duke's Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies department.  

Her comparative focus is also devoted to fieldwork research and involved ethnography (CITI and RIB training) in places like Cuba, Benin, Senegal, Kenya, and Mexico. She has also worked with the UNESCO Slave Route in Africa.