Biography

Patricia Felisa Barbeito joined the RISD faculty in 1998, after completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University.  She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in American literature and culture.   Her areas of research, most broadly, examine the constitutive role of African-American literature and culture in the shaping of U.S. identity and national culture.  Her research interests include the captivity narrative’s role in shaping conceptions race, gender, and nation (including seventeenth-century Indian captivity narratives, slave narratives and contemporary accounts of alien abduction); prison narratives; the African-American protest novels of the 1940s and 1950s; blaxploitation film; autobiography; and the association of race and style in American culture.  Publications based on this research have appeared in such journals as American Literature and the Journal of American Culture.  She is currently working on a book about African-American author Chester Himes titled, One Jump Ahead of Disaster:  The Politics of Race, Interracial Sex, and Literary Style in Chester Himes’s Writing. She is also a translator of modern Greek fiction and poetry.  Her translations include Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry by Menis Koumandareas (co-translated with Vangelis Calotychos; Birmingham University Press, 2004), and, most recently, Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation (forthcoming).   

Patricia Barbeito

Associate Professor
pbarbeit@risd.edu
401-454-6575

• BA, Brandeis University
• MA, Harvard University
• PHD, Harvard University

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