Dr. Robert Fanuzzi is Associate Professor of English and
Assistant Chair of the department on the Staten Island
Campus. With a Ph. D. in English from Northwestern
University, he teaches eighteenth and nineteenth century American
literature, African-American literature, and trans-Atlantic
literatures from both the colonial and the post-colonial
eras. His recent undergraduate and graduate teaching focusses
on “hemispheric” American Studies, connecting the eighteenth and
nineteenth century United States to colonial societies and
histories in Latin America, South America, and the French
Caribbean.
Dr. Fanuzzi is the author of the book, Abolition’s Public Sphere, a
study of public culture and civil rights politics in the nineteenth
century antislavery struggle. He has also published
extensively on the French and British antislavery movement as well
as on the origin of mixed race or “mulatto” fiction in American
literature. His recent article on the antislavery fiction
writer Lydia Maria Child, “How Mixed Race Politics Entered the
United States: Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal,” addresses the
controversy over mixed race marriages and sexual unions in the
nineteenth century. He is now completing a book that
examines the impact of French colonial policies of race mixing in
the United States.
On the Staten Island campus, Dr. Fanuzzi has partnered with the
Vincentian Institute for Social Action in an effort to create an
“engaged” liberal arts curriculum. Out of this effort is
emerging an interdisciplinary “Food Studies” curriculum that
examines the negative effect of industrialized food on health,
well-being, and economic development. Dr. Fanuzzi has also created
a new American Studies program, an interdisciplinary minor with a
similar emphasis on community engagement and the SJU Vincentian
mission.