Marisa J. Fuentes

Marisa J. Fuentes is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She specializes in the Early Modern Atlantic World, the history of slavery, and women's and gender history. Her work bridges historical and feminist methodologies to interrogate archival silences and violence of the past.

• Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2007)

Fuentes’s research explores the intersections of capitalism, transatlantic slavery, and the disposability of Black lives, with a focus on enslaved women, archival methodologies, and feminist theory. Her book Dispossessed Lives (2016) examines violence and archival gaps in the history of enslaved women, while her current manuscript Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives extends this analysis to the 17th and 18th centuries.

Her publications span journals and edited volumes like Scarlet and Black and History of the Present. Themes include Black Atlantic lives, historiographic loss, and the afterlife of captivity. She has been awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize and the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize.

• 2024: Elected member, American Antiquarian Society
• 2023: Elected Fellow, Society of American Historians
• 2017: Berkshires Conference First Book Prize

Fuentes teaches undergraduate courses on Caribbean history, slavery, and feminist theory, alongside graduate seminars on gender and the archive, and the Black Atlantic. For 2024–2025, she will be a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies in Princeton, NJ.