Deborah Jenson, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies (French) and Professor, French Studies; Acting Director of the Center for French & Francophone Studies

My literary history of the Haitian Revolution, "Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution," was published with Liverpool UP in 2011. A co-edited volume with medical historians Warwick Anderson and Richard E. Keller, "Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties" is just out with Duke UP. With Michaeline Crichlow and Pat Northover, the special issue from our 2010 "States of Freedom: Freedom of States" conference in Kingston, Jamaica, will be published soon in "The Global South." An article on mirror neurons and literary bio-mimesis with neuropsychiatrist Marco Iacoboni will be out soon in "California Italian Studies." The Haiti Humanities Laboratory I co-direct with Laurent Dubois continues to generate collaborative projects with social and/or instrumental relevance, such as our "Haiti: History Embedded in Amber" artwork and catalog, and a forthcoming article and digital map on the history of Caribbean cholera in the CDC journal "Emerging Infectious Diseases."

Contact Info:

Office Location:	112 Languages Building
Office Phone:	(919) 660-3122
Email Address:

Teaching (Fall 2012):

• FRENCH 481D.001, FLAUBERT'S BRAIN NEUROHUMANITI Synopsis

  Languages 305, M 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as LIT 246D.001, NEUROSCI 241D.001)

• FRENCH 481D.02D, FLAUBERT'S BRAIN NEUROHUMANITI Synopsis

  Languages 208, W 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as LIT 246D.02D, NEUROSCI 241D.02D)

• ROMST 490S.02, TOPICS ROMANCE STUDIES Synopsis

  Perkins 2-065, Th 04:40 PM-07:10 PM

  (also cross-listed as ARTSVIS 490S.01, LATAMER 490S.02)

• CREOLE 701.01, ELEMENTARY CREOLE I Synopsis

  Languages 305, MF 08:30 AM-09:30 AM; Languages 305, TuTh 08:30 AM-09:45 AM

Office Hours:

By appointment; please email deborah.jenson@duke.edu.

Education:

PhD

Harvard University

1994

Research Interests: French and Haitian Studies; Creole/Kreyòl; Global Health; "Neurohumanities"

Current projects: Empathy and cognition, Dessalines, PTSD in post-earthquake Leogane, Creole Rousseau, Cholera in the 19th century Caribbean

I take the broad mandate of the humanist very seriously: my research is diverse. In the field of neuroscience and the humanities, my work includes an article on mirror neurons and literary bio-mimesis with neuropsychiatrist Marco Iacoboni, a course called "Flaubert's Brain: Neurohumanities," and several projects related to traumatic stress, cognition, and culture. In the arena of Global Health and the History of Medicine, we are working with Haiti Lab students on topics ranging from the history of cholera in Haiti and the Caribbean (see our article and digital map in Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2011) to the history of anthropological psychiatry in Haiti, to post-disaster mental health. I am also researching slaves' African ethnic identities in 18th century Saint-Domingue through study of ads for runaway slaves.

Duties:

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Romance Studies; Co-Director, FHI Haiti Lab; Director, Duke in Paris Summer Program; Co-Convenor, DIBS/FHI Neurohumanities Research Group

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (2011; paperback forthcoming Feb. 2012), pp. 322, Liverpool University Press
2. Deborah Jenson (with Warwick Anderson and Richard E. Keller), Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (2011), pp. 328, Duke University Press
3. Deborah Jenson, Marco Iacoboni, Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation, California Italian Studies (2011) [3sc3j6dj]
4. D. Jenson, V. Szabo, and the Haiti Lab Student Research Team, Cholera in Haiti and Other Caribbean Regions, 19th Century, Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 17 no. 11 (November, 2011), pp. 6, Centers for Disease Control [eid1711.110958]
5. Deborah Jenson, Kidnapped narratives: Mobility without Autonomy and the Nation/Novel Analogy, in A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (2011), Blackwell Press
6. Deborah Jenson, The Common Without Copies, the International Without Cosmopolitanism: Marx Against the Romanticism of Likeness, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 22 no. 3 (2010), pp. 420-433
7. Deborah Jenson, Hegel and Dessalines: Philosophy and the African Diaspora, New West Indian Guide, vol. 84 no. 3 & 4 (2010), pp. 4-9
8. Deborah Jenson, Dessalines's American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence, The Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. Vol. 15 no. No. 1 and 2 (2010), pp. 72-102  [abs]
9. Deborah Jenson, The Writing of Disaster in Haiti: Signifying Cataclysm from Slave Revolution to Earth Quake, in Haiti Rising, edited by Martin Munro (2010), pp. 103-112, Liverpool University Press [publication.asp]
10. Deborah Jenson and Doris Kadish, Sarah, An English Translation (2008), MLA Editions
11. Deborah Jenson, Francophone World Literature (Littérature-monde) Cosmopolitanism, and Decadence: ‘Citizen of the World’ without the Citizen?, in Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde, edited by Alec Hargreaves (2010), pp. 15-35, Liverpool University Press [publication.asp]
12. Deborah Jenson, Toussaint Louverture, Spin Doctor? Launching the Haitian Revolution in the French Media, in Tree of Liberty: Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2008), pp. 41-62, University of Virginia Press
13. Deborah Jenson, Before Malcolm X, Dessalines: A ‘French’ Tradition of Black Atlantic Radicalism, edited by Alec Hargreaves and Jean-Marc Mourra, International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 10 no. 3 (2007), pp. 329-342 [ijfs.10.3.329_1]
14. Deborah Jenson, Fétichisme de la marchandise: la poésie des courtisanes noires ou de couleur à Saint-Domingue, in Relire l’histoire et la littérature haïtiennes, edited by Christiane Ndiaye (2007), pp. 27-56, Presses nationales d'Haïti
15. Deborah Jenson, Myth, History, and Witnessing in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s Caribbean Poetics, edited by Adrianna Paliyenko, L'Esprit Créateur, vol. 47 no. 4 (2007), pp. 329-343 [html]
16. Deborah Jenson, The Haiti Issue, Yale French Studies, vol. 107 (2005)
17. Deborah Jenson, Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), pp. 294, Johns Hopkins UP