Jennifer Brittan completed her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her primary research focus is hemispheric American and Caribbean studies, with interests in critical race and diaspora studies, literary geographies, and speculative fiction.

Brittan is the editor of a first critical edition of The Mambi-Land: Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba by James J. O’Kelly (University of Virginia Press, 2021). The Mambi-Land (1874) is a rare, book-length account of Cuba’s Ten Years’ War for independence from Spain (1868-78) and provides a window on a decisive though generally overlooked period in U.S.-Cuba relations. Drawing on a largely unknown archive, Brittan’s critical introduction shows how the New York Herald made Cuba the foreign policy issue of the time and a question vital for defining the United States in the post-Civil War moment. Cuba emerges as integral to the story of black Reconstruction, particularly as a nation-wide African American campaign challenged the nation’s continued investment in slavery. Brittan has also created a companion digital archive at <www.okellyarchive.com>.

Currently Brittan is working on a book project called Terminal City: Transit and Anatopos in the American Mediterranean.

 

Selected Publications

“Martin R. Delany’s Speculative Fiction and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Slave

     Conspiracy,” Studies in American Fiction. 46.1 (2019): 79-102.

doi:10.1353/saf.2019.0003

“The Terminal: Eric Walrond, the City of Colón, and the Caribbean of the Panama Canal.”

     American Literary History. 25.2 (2013): 294-316. doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajs077

 “A Foreign Correspondent in the Mambi-Land: James J. O’Kelly’s Fugitive Cuba, Fernando

    Ortiz’s Irish Mambí.” Travel Writing and Cuba. Spec. issue of Studies in Travel Writing,

ed. Peter Hulme. 15.4 (2011): 377-392. doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2011.617967

Dr Brittan's most recent project is serving as editor of "The Mambi-Land, Or, Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba" by James J. O’Kelly: A Critical Edition. University of Virginia Press, 2022.