Michelle Stephens is the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and a professor of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She is also a psychoanalyst and served as dean of the humanities in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). She has published numerous articles on the intersection of race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. She has also coedited three recent collections in archipelagic studies: Archipelagic American Studies with Brian Russell Roberts (Duke, 2017); Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago with Tatiana Flores (Duke, 2017); and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). She was a founding series coeditor of Rutgers University Press's Critical Caribbean Studies book series and sits on the editorial advisory board of Rowman and Littlefield's Rethinking the Island book series.
