Natalie M. Léger is a Caribbean studies, Haitian studies, and Black studies scholar who brings history, philosophy, and politics in conversation with fiction and film. Her interdisciplinary scholarship specializes in race and anti-colonial thought, decolonial philosophy, and resistant politics in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature and African diasporic literature. These interests are also treated alongside her efforts to interrogate the place of magic and the fantastic in politics and philosophy, which she pursues when studying and teaching about magical realism and love as a politic. Together, her areas of study and research foci, inform the questions that animate her work. These questions include, what makes us human in a world categorized by difference? What shapes how we love and who we love in politically fraught moments? Or how might magic or the fantastic serve as a political lens to reimagine our relations the world over?

Léger’s work focuses on the speculative nature of resistant striving and treats seriously the importance of the imagination to political praxis and philosophies of freedom, as evidenced by her essays and first book, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination. Her book analyzes twentieth century Haitian revolutionary fictions, histories, and theories by seminal Caribbean writers and thinkers outside of Haiti who write about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804); and it addresses how the urgency of political turmoil or unrest in a particular moment produces literature determined to imagine the world differently to embolden others to act it differently.

Léger was awarded multiple yearlong fellowships in support of this project, including the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now Institute for Citizens and Scholars) and a faculty fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She also completed an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University in 2014 and was a 2016-2017 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship Recipient. She received her PhD in English Literature from Cornell University in 201l, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Temple University.