Aisha FinchAssociate Professor of WGSSDirector of Graduate Studies (WGSS)

Aisha Finch is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. A formally trained scholar of the African Diaspora, her research focuses on the study of slavery in Cuba and the Atlantic World, transnational Black feminism, and Black political movements and social life in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. Broadly speaking, Prof. Finch's work explores the radical Black practices of freedom that disrupted slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy in nineteenth-century Cuba; the gendered analytics and feminist methodologies that have transformed studies of slavery; and the ways in which transnational genealogies of Black feminism engender alternative readings of colonial archives. She is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, which received the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Schomburg Center’s Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, and was a finalist for the Fredrick Douglass Book Prize. She is also the co-editor, with Fannie T. Rushing, of Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912. Finch's new research focuses on comparative histories of Black women and the sacred, arguing that Black women in the rural Caribbean and the U.S. South presented an insistent refusal to the violence of the plantation world, during and after slavery, through their knowledge and reimagination of the sacred. She has also begun work on an exploration of Black feminist intellectual thought in the GlobalHispanophone, examining the ways in which activists and scholars in Latin America have redefined the boundaries of Black feminism through their critiques of coloniality and anti-Blackness.

RESEARCH

Cuban and Comparative Atlantic Slavery; Transnational Black Feminism; Black Women's Histories & Cultural Production; the Caribbean and Latin American History; Global Black Feminist Movements; Political and Social Movements in the African Diaspora; Black Cultural Studies

PUBLICATIONS

Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, University of North Carolina Press, 2015

Co-editor with Fannie T. Rushing, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912, Louisiana State University Press, 2019

“Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 2010), 101-143.

“‘What Looks Like a Revolution’: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843–1844,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (Spring 2014) 112-134

“The Repeating Rebellion: Slave Resistance and Political Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, 1812-1844,” in Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912 (2019)

“Black Feminist Knowledge Production, Archival Recuperation, and Slave Resistance Movements,” The Body and the Body Politic Roundtable, Women and Social Movements in the United States Vol. 23, no. 2 (2019): 1-4.

“Cécile Fatiman and Petra Carabalí: Late Eighteenth-Century Haiti and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” in As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, edited by Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri Snyder, Cambridge University Press, 2020

“Introduction: Black Feminism and the Practice of Care,” Special Issue of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, forthcoming, Spring/Summer 2022, co-edited with Jessica Millward and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Aisha FinchAssociate Professor of WGSSDirector of Graduate Studies (WGSS)

RESEARCH

PUBLICATIONS

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