Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She conducts research and teaches courses on race, gender, and citizenship in France, the Caribbean, and Africa. Her areas of expertise include Black women’s writings, anticolonial activism, and slavery in the French Atlantic. Her work centers marginalized voices and shows how their contributions can offer us new ways to think about contemporary cultural and political questions.

She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press 2020), published in France as Imaginer la libération: Des femmes noires face à l'empire (Éditions Rot-Bo-Krik 2023). She is also the co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her new project, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World (under contract), examines what writings by enslaved children can teach us about how to tell stories about difficult pasts. Her work has been supported by awards from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and others. Her research has been featured in public venues including Al Jazeera, France Culture, HuffPost, Radio France Internationale, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.