Heather Russell

Heather Russell, Ph.D., is the vice provost for Faculty Leadership and Success at Florida International University and a Professor of Literature. She is the former dean of the School of Environment, Arts and Society in the College of Arts, Sciences & Education and chair of FIU's Department of English.

She earned her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University and specialized in African Diaspora Literature and Theory; Postcolonial theory; Anglophone Caribbean Cultural Studies; and African American Literature (mid-19th-21st centuries). Her book, Legba's Crossing: Narratology in The African Atlantic is part of a general body of work on black modernity. She is co-editor of Rihanna: Barbados World Gurl in Global Popular Culture, a cultural studies collection that theorizes gender, sexuality, race, popular culture, and economy and has published on a wide array of subjects related to African American and Afro-Caribbean scholarly concerns with essays on Quentin Tarantino's Django, Marcus Garvey and Popular Culture, and on "quilting" in African American women's literature. In keeping with her commitment to the Humanities, over the past 12 years, she has worked with various state-based affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and with the National Humanities Center. She was a lead scholar for the Florida Humanities Council's NEH-funded Landmarks in American History seminar Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and her Eatonville Roots.