Since 2017, I have been an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY, located in the South Bronx, where I teach various courses on writing and literature and work with the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. Currently, my book project A Canada in the South: Maroons in American Literature is under advance contact with SUNY (The State University of New York) Press. My work has appeared in MELUS, small axe salon, Nursing Clio, Inside Higher Ed, HETS, and elsewhere. Along with my work on marronage, I also research community college pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, writing across the curriculum, and US film and pop culture.
On February 1, 2017 I received my Ph.D. from the English department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I also earned a Certificate in American Studies. Previously, I have received my M.A. and M.Phil. in English from the Graduate Center and a B.A. in English from Lafayette College. In the Fall of 2016, I was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center. Previously, I was a 2015-16 IRADAC (Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean) Fellow at the Graduate Center and a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Fellow at Hostos Community College, CUNY, a position held from 2014-2016. I have been a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and an Adjunct Lecturer at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, where I have taught courses in both composition and literature from the pre-1865 and post-1865 periods, both American and British. Broadly, my research and teaching interests are in US literatures of the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the pre-Civil War period. I study the intersections of race, slavery, resistance, freedom, and textuality in the United States and the Atlantic world with particular attention to literary representations of maroons and marronage.
My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the English Department at the Graduate Center (the Morton Cohen Dissertation Year Travel Award); the Advanced Research Collaborative; the Doctoral Students’ Research Grant Program; IRADAC (the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean); a highly competitive Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship; travel grants from the Modern Language Association, Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Northeast MLA, South Central MLA, and the Presidential Research Fund at the Graduate Center; and a Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship in American Literature at the University of Virginia. This past June, I spent a week at the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to perform research for my dissertation in their wonderful historical collections.
I was a 2020-2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow, an award coming with $40,000 to work on completing my book manuscript.
CONTACT: sgerrity@hostos.cuny.edu
Please download my most recent CV below. (Newer update coming soon–email for details.)
Sean Gerrity, Ph.D. 