Marissa Kessenich
Assistant Professor, English
- Email: marissa.kessenich@furman.edu
- Office: Furman Hall 100-R
Dr. Marissa Kessenich is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary studies and American Studies. She specializes in African American literature, history, and culture, with an emphasis on Black feminist thought and popular representations of Black womanhood. Her research broadly investigates the persistence of historical recovery as a mandate for both creative and scholarly writing about Black life. Dr. Kessenich’s current book project centers on representations of Sally Hemings across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, examining Hemings as a narrative symbol who takes on the paradoxes, ambiguities, and ambivalences of American history, both through her erasure (and the erasure of those paradoxes) and through attempts to recover her.
Dr. Kessenich offers courses on African American and multi-ethnic American literature, including a seminar on the African American novel. She also teaches a First-Year Writing course entitled “Language, Argument, and Culture,” which examines how movies shape, reflect, and critique culture and society.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Virginia
- M.A., University of Virginia
- B.A., The University of Texas at Austin
Publications
- “Clotel and the (Counter)Historical Novel: Anachronism and Speculation as Fugitive Fictional Practices.” Studies in American Fiction (Fall 2025).
- “Journey to the Center of the Empire: Meghan Markle and the Threat to the British Royal Family.”
Meghan Markle: Essays on Monarchy, Race, and Colonialism, edited by Duchess Harris and Julie Schwietert Collazo (The University of Arizona Press, 2026).
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