Sarah Quesada

Research Areas

US Latinx/Latin American Literature, Francophone North and West African Lit & Lusophone Africa; Atlantic studies; Revolutionary Movements, Marxism, the Non-aligned movement; Postcolonial and Decolonial studies; Heritage tourism; the Archive and Oral histories; World Literature and the Global South; Queer theory.

Sarah M. Quesada is a comparatist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University, and by courtesy, of the department of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. Her main interests are literatures of the Global South—Latin American, Latinx, Caribbean, and African literatures. 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). The book examines hidden archives of African influence in most widely read Latinx and Latin American authors of the last fifty years, through these authors' conjurings of the era of Slave Trade, 19^th century imperialism, Cold War internationalism, and the rise of UNESCO heritage tourism. Quesada’s work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Humanities Center (NHC), the Stanford Humanities Center and Stanford's Center for African Studies, among other places. Her comparative focus is also devoted to training students in archival and fieldwork research. Her research has involved ethnography (CITI and RIB training) and work on the UNESCO Slave Route in Africa, as well as archive consultation across the Atlantic World, in mainly France, Brazil, Benin, Senegal, Cuba, and the US. Her second book in progress is focused on the writings and visuals from regions in Africa and Greater Mexico concerning African revolutionary movements, with attention to state tourism, government archives, oral histories, and little-known texts by both prominent intellectuals and lesser known feminists across the Global South. 

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, American Quarterly, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Latino Studies, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Afro-Hispanic Review, Oxford Bibliographies, The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies, the Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke UP 2016),the Journal of Haitian Studies, 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). In 2021, she joined the editorial board of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism  (Duke UP).