Simone A. James Alexander earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and holds Master of Arts degrees from Rutgers University and Universitet Druzhby Narodof, Moscow, Russia. Her primary fields of research include Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Caribbean Literature, Migration and Diaspora Studies. Her courses, Major Authors: Toni Morrison, Postcolonial Women Writers, and Migrations and Diasporas directly engage students with feminist and gender studies. Dr. Alexander also teaches Contemporary Russian Literature and graduate courses in Postcolonial Literature. She is an affiliated faculty of the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Russian and East European Studies Program.

Dr. Alexander’s book African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (University Press of Florida, 2014; reprinted May 2016) is the recipient of the 2015 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award.  The book also received an Honorable Mention from the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award, 2015. She is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001) and co-editor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press, 2013). Alexander is currently working on Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality and Nationhood in Caribbean Women’s Literature and Black Freedom in Communist Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions.