Election Committee

Patricia Saunders, Chair

PATRICIA J. SAUNDERS, PhD is Professor of English and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables.  She obtained her BSc. from the University of Maryland in Agricultural Science (1990), and her MA (1993) and PhD in English and Cultural Studies (1999) from the University of Pittsburgh. She has been the Senior Co-Editor of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal since the journal was founded by Sandra Pouchet Paquet in 2003.  Prof. Saunders is also the author of Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Lexington, 2007), and co-editor of Music. Memory. Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Ian Randle Press, 2007).

Her second book, Buyers Beware: Epistemologies of Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture was published in the Critical Caribbean Studies Series with Rutgers University Press in 2022. This critical study examines a range of contemporary Caribbean popular cultural modes of expression to argue that the bonds between consumption and citizenship in the region are stronger now more than ever despite higher rates of unemployment and socioeconomic inequity. Her work has also appeared in numerous academic journals including: Small Axe, Transforming Anthropology, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Plantation Society in the Americas, Anthurium, and Feminist Studies. 

E-mail: vice.president@caribbeanstudiesassociation.org