About
Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law & Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014). His other writings have appeared in journals including Atlantic Studies, Law & Humanities, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), PALARA (Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association), and Slavery & Abolition, as well as in peer-reviewed edited volumes including ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (SUNY Press, 2020), and Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations (University of Georgia Press, 2018). His current book project, “Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction,” has as its goal the reconstruction and reorientation of ‘Law and Literature’ along more globally inclusive and materialist lines. Education
Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, Oxford Institute of Legal Practice, 2010.
Graduate Diploma in Law, (Lincoln’s Inn Haldane Scholar), Oxford Brookes University School of Law, 2009.
Ph.D. English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2008.
M.A. English, University of Sussex, 2003.
B.A. (M.A.) (Hons) English Literature, University of Edinburgh, 2001. Publications
Books:
From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary. SUNY Press. 2024. Print.
The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints. University of Virginia Press, 2014. Print.
Articles:
2020 “Haiti, Principle of Hope: Parallels and Connections in the works of C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant.” Co-author with Prof. Mariana Past.
Atlantic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2: 260–280.
2019 “Black Agency and Aesthetic Innovation in Sergio Giral’s
El otro Francisco.”
PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association. No. 23: 22–32.
2017 “The Slave Narrative and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon
Northup, and Colonial Violence.”
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Vol. 42, No. 2: 94–114.
2017 “‘From freedom’s sun some glimmering rays are shed that cheer the gloomy realms’: Dessalines at Dartmouth, 1804.” Co-author with Prof. Julia Gaffield.
Slavery & Abolition. Vol. 38, No. 1: 155–177.
2015 “Hercules, the Hydra, and the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture.”
Atlantic Studies,
Vol. 12, No. 4: 393–411.
2012 “Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire’s and C.L.R. James’s Recuperations of the Haitian Revolution.”
Law and Humanities, Vol. 6, No. 2: 197–216.
Book Chapters:
2023 “The Slave Narrative and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon Northup, and Colonial Violence.”
The Films of Steve McQueen, ed. Thomas Austin.
Edinburgh University Press.
2022 “Langston Hughes and the Haitian Revolution.”
Langston Hughes in Context, eds. Vera Kutzinski & Anthony Reed.
Cambridge University Press: 129–139.
2022 “Socioeconomic Rights and the Haitian Revolution.”
Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History, eds. Charles Walton & Steven Jenson. Cambridge University Press: 82–98.
2020 “The Haitian Revolution and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s
La última cena (
The Last Supper, 1976).”
Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean,
ed. Vanessa K. Valdés, SUNY University Press: 113–133.
2018
“‘To break our chains and form a free people’: Race, Nation, and Haiti’s Imperial Constitution of 1805.”
Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, eds. Whitney Stewart and John Garrison Marks, University of Georgia Press: 71–88.
