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Sam Plasencia

Title

Assistant Professor of English

Department

English

Information

Office Hours

Fall 2024: Fridays 10-1

Current Courses

CRS Title Sec
EN120L Language, Thought, and Writing: Language + Race + Power A
EN232 Early African American Literature A
EN271A The Unthought in Critical Theory: We Need to Ruin the Ruins A
EN271A The Unthought in Critical Theory: We Need to Ruin the Ruins B
EN321 Black Liberation Theology in Early America A

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • M.A., University of Florida
  • B.A., Rutgers University

Areas of Expertise

  • Early African American intellectual history
  • Early African American print culture
  • Early national and antebellum U.S. racial history
  • Black studies
  • Early national and antebellum U.S. literature
  • U.S. protest writing
  • Early Black liberation theology
  • Phillis Wheatley Peters
  • The Black Atlantic

Personal Information

My research and teaching are motivated by a concern with 1) how language shapes our perception and experience of reality, 2) how we might marshal language and narrative to dismantle harmful racializing structures of power, and 3) how we can craft alternative narratives on which to build our ethics and being. My orientation towards language and narrative is transdisciplinary, and so my work traverses the categories of thought and research that organize contemporary higher education.

Current Research

I am currently working on a book titled “Signifying Against Anti-Blackness: Black Liberation Theology before the Black Church,” which reconstructs a synchronous, geographically dispersed intellectual tradition that 1) refuses the legitimacy of enslaving Christianity and 2) advances a corrective liberatory ethics grounded in humanity’s shared fallenness and belovedness before God. This project situates eighteenth-century New England Black theologists like Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley (Peters), John Marrant, Prince Hall, and Lemuel Haynes within the triangle trade’s continual circulation of goods, communication, and people (enslaved and free), which ensured the perpetual presence of African peoples and cosmologies in New England in order to ask: what contours of their thought become legible when we do not reduce their intellectual influence to white Protestant evangelism? Weaving together the extant work of New England Black theologists with the extant reports of non-published Black preachers (from across the Americas and the Caribbean), this project encourages us to think about Black theology hemispherically, wherein Black evangelism exists on a continuum with more explicitly syncretic Afro-Caribbean religions in the colonial (and later US) south and the Caribbean. 

Work currently under review with J19, New England Quarterly, and ABO include an article on prioritizing Harriet Wilson’s intellectual labor by shortening the title of her novel in our in-text citations to Sketches, a reading of David Walker’s rhetorical insurgency, the first article-length biography and literary review of Rev. Greensbury Washington Offley (1808-1896), and an essay on teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters

Ongoing projects include: an article on forms of protest in Phillis Wheatley Peters' oeuvre, an article on Jupiter Hammon’s anti-nationalism; an article on how eighteenth-century white theologists unthink African humanity; a critical reader (with Don Holmes) on the orations/sermons celebrating the US withdrawal from the international slave trade (1808-1816); a critical reader of Black testimonies to varied forms of anti-Blackness in the early national United States; and a digital humanities project cataloging Black-authored texts and texts related to Black life currently housed in Maine.

Publications