Directory
Maureen E. Ruprecht (Fadem) is Professor of English at the City University of New York (KCC) and a widely published postcolonial, partition, and political justice scholar. She completed her PhD in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Maureen appears in interview, presents at and organizes conferences, and served a two-year term on the MLA committee on Academic Freedom (CAFPRR). She gave two papers at MLA 2026 and is scheduled to give another at MLA 2027.
Maureen’s research—on contemporary Irish literature, African diasporic literature, and the global literatures of Partition—looks at the political “life” and the liberatory valences of certain poetical designs in historical literary writing: the border and the fragment, forms of literary silence, and emblematic deployments of intertextuality. More broadly her work consider capitalism in its relation to imperialism, race and gender justice, and social and political justice, reparations primarily. Recent peer reviewed journal articles include “Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses’” (RISE 2021) and, appearing soon, “Goodbye to All That: Deconstructing Modernity, Unreifying Capitalism in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven” (Apocalyptica, 2026). It uses critical theory—Benjamin, Lukács, Jameson—to show how the novel decommodifies modern objects and institutions and envisions a world without capitalism as emancipatory ideal.
Maureen has four scholarly monographs in print and two soon to come. In 2021, Routledge published two of Maureen’s books: Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations, and the co-edited collection The Economics of Empire. She’s at work on two collections: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Reparations (Liverpool UP, 2027) and The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison (2027). Lastly, the proposal for a new single-author monograph is in peer review: Five Rocks and a Geologic Tropology of Imperial Debt: The Case for Reparations for Empire is a thoroughgoing look at justice “after” empire. It develops four Partition case studies—Ireland, South Asia, Sudan, Palestine-Israel—as evidentiary material confirming the interminable life of colonial extractivism and shoring up the reparations case. It argues for the formation of a decolonizing-world solidarity as key reparations modality, one that is fully global and fully sustainable, pursued uncompromisingly in a (co)mutuality with the community of justice scholars.
Courses
Maureen is a member of the Honors faculty and often teaches Writing Intensive and Civic Engagement designated courses. She most often teaches college composition: English 24 and 93, most recently, and English 12 numerous times in past years. Professor Fadem also teaches various literature courses, including English 30, Introduction to Literature; English 32, World Literature; English 40, The Short Story; and English 77, The Roots of Black Literature. Starting in Spring 2015, Maureen will begin teaching courses in the Early College Program at Leon M. Goldstein High School.
Education
2012: PhD in English Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY – PhD Program in English
Selected Publications and/or Other Resources
The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
“Provincializing the Nation-State: The Meaning of Partition.” In Synthesis, Special issue on “Living through the Interregnum." Volume 8, Fall 2014.
“Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin’s ‘Other at the Edge of Life.’” Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond the Nation. Eds. James P. Byrne, Padraig Kirwan and Michael O’Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 291 - 312.
Review Article: “’Poetry is Not a Luxury’: Meena Alexander’s Raw Silk.” Semicerchio, XXXII – XXXIII (September 2005): 129 – 131.
“The Interval.” Word. On Being a [Woman] Writer. Ed. Jocelyn Burrell. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004: 180 – 201.
Review: Yann Martel, Life of Pi. South Asian Review, 24 (December 2003): 231 – 233.
"Sparrows and Hawks: Class, Gender and the Politics of Decolonization in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.” South Asian Review, 23.2 (2002): 12 – 13.
“Translation, An Art of Negativity: A Conversation with Meena Alexander.” Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, 45.2 (Spring/Summer 2002): 102 – 110.
Research Interests
Maureen's research is on Postcolonial Literature (especially that of Ireland, South Asia, Israel and Palestine), Partition Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and Literary Theory.
Institutional Affiliations / Professional Societies
Current Memberships: the Modern Language Association (MLA); the American Conference
for Irish Studies (ACIS).
Executive Committee Member for 1-year term, South Asian Literary Association, 2000
– 2001.