Assistant Chair
Associate Professor
English
St. John's College of Arts and Sciences
DaSilva Hall, Room 310
Staten Island campus
(718) 390-4416
fanuzzir@stjohns.edu
Educational Background
Ph. D., 1993, Northwestern University, English, Dissertation Year
Fellow. Dissertation: 'Be Yourself': The Public Sphere and
Revolutionary Politics of the New England Abolition Movement.
directed by Michael Warner
M. A., 1987, Northwestern University, English, Presidential
Fellow
B. A., 1983, College of William and Mary, English and Philosophy,
magna cum laude
Robert Fanuzzi joined St. John's in 1993 with an M. A. and Ph.
D. in American Literature from Northwestern University, where he
was a Presidential Fellow. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and
magna cum laude from the College of William and Mary with a B. A.
in English and Philosophy. Since becoming a member of the
department, he has served as a University Senator and as a member
of the University Core Curriculum committee. In 2001, he was
given the Martin Luther King Award and in 2002, he was named a Man
of Distinction on the Staten Island campus. St. John’s
gave him its Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship Award in
2006.
Fanuzzi’s main area of research is the American and
trans-Atlantic antislavery movements of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. His many scholarly articles and essays
have appeared in such journals as American Literature and
American Literary History, and in the essay anthology, The
Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays.
His book, Abolition’s Public Sphere, published by the
University of Minnesota Press in 2003, is a study of William Lloyd
Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and the print
culture of the New England abolition movement. Since then,
Fanuzzi has compiled a collection of international antislavery
literature for Modern Library and is completing a new book on
French political commentary on American slavery and race
relations. His emphasis in this research and in his recent
teaching has been the place of mixed-race peoples in the United
States and the role of inter-racial politics in international
movements of liberation.
Fanuzzi is a member of the editorial board of ESQ: A
Journal of the American Renaissance, and a manuscript reader
for American Quarterly. He has given over twenty papers on
his research interests at national professional conferences and is
a member of Columbia University and City University of New York
seminars on the topics of American culture and international
politics.