Jessie Dunbar to present “Nancy Prince, Nicholas Said, and Russia”

On Thursday, November 8, 12 noon in the Grucci Room, Africana Research Center Post-Doctoral fellow Jessie Dunbar will discuss her scholarship in a talk entitled “Nancy Prince, Nicholas Said, and Russia.”  Working with material from her dissertation, Democracy, Diaspora, and Disillusionment: Black Itinerancy and the Propaganda Wars, Jessie Dunbar extends Black Atlantic discussions into Russia by including exchanges between black people and Russians in the nineteenth century.  Set in the same time period, the narratives by Nancy Prince and Nicholas Said speak to issues of race, gender, class, and religion, even as they provide striking explorations of imperial Russian culture. 

Jessie Dunbar completed her B.A. in English at Clark Atlanta University. She received her Master’s degree from the University of Georgia, where she completed a thesis entitled, “Tracing the Arc: Representations of Slave Children in History and Literature.”  Jessie holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Emory University.  Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century African American literature as well as diaspora studies. She has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Graduate Research Opportunities Fellowship and the Laney Graduate School Diversity Fellowship.