Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Professor, Hispanic Studies

B.A., University of Puerto Rico; M.A., M.Phil, Ph.D., New York University

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program in Africana Studies at Vassar College, where she holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She is also a participating faculty member in the Programs in Latin American Studies, which she currently directs, and Environmental Studies. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A., an M.Phil., and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She has been at Vassar since 1991, having previously been an associate professor at Lehman College (CUNY).

Ms. Paravisini-Gebert is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (Rutgers 1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (Greenwood 1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (NYU 2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos) and the forthcoming Literatures of the Caribbean (Greenwood 2007). She is at work on Glimpses of Hell, a study of the aftermath of the 1902 eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano of Martinique, and on José Martí: A Life (Rutgers) a biography of the Cuban patriot.

Ms. Paravisini-Gebert has co-edited a number of collections of essays, most notably Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (Rutgers 1997), Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean (Palgrave 2001), and Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (Palgrave 2001). Her most recent edited volume, Obsolete Geographies: Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures, with Ivette Romero-Cesareo, will be published in 2007 by the University Press of Florida. Her critical editions of texts by Caribbean women writers include Phyllis Allfrey's The Orchid House (Rutgers 1997), Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam (Rutgers 1991, New York Times Notable Book), Pleasure and the Word (Plume 1994), and It Falls Into Place: The Short Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (Papillote 2004, TLS Notable Book). Her articles and literary translations have appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Jean Rhys Review, the Journal of Caribbean Literature, Obsidian, and the Revista Mexicana del Caribe, among others. She has recently translated Jean Rhys’s Sleep It Off Lady into Spanish.