Directory
Maureen E. Ruprecht (Fadem) is Professor of English at the City University of New York (KCC) and a widely published postcolonial, partition, and political justice scholar. She completed her PhD in English (postcolonial, Irish, and gender studies) at The Graduate Center of CUNY. Maureen appears in interview, presents at and organizes conferences, and recently completed a two-year term on the MLA committee on Academic Freedom (CAFPRR). She gave two papers at MLA 2026 and is scheduled to give another at MLA 2027: “Burning Questions Burned: The Longue Durée of Unjust Enrichment and the ‘Ghosting’ of Justice” is to be given on the session, “The Task of the Critic in the New Configurations of Imperialism.”
Maureen’s research, on literatures of Ireland and the African diaspora as well as global literatures of Partition, looks at the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence in narrative and verse, at race and gender justice, and at social and political justice, especially reparations. Recent peer reviewed journal articles include “‘A thing breaks beyond naming’: A Review Article on David Lloyd’s 2022 Books, Counterpoetics of Modernity and The Harm Fields” (ISR 2023) and “Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses’” (RISE 2021). In production now and soon out is “Goodbye to All That: Deconstructing Modernity, Unreifying Capitalism in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven” (Apocalyptica, special issue: “Critical Theory at the Endgame,” 2026). It uses critical theory—Benjamin, Lukács, Jameson—to show how the novel unreifies modern commodities and institutions and envisions a world without capitalism as emancipatory ideal.
Maureen has four scholarly monographs in print. The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands appeared in 2015 from Palgrave and Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian was brought out in 2020 (Rowman & Littlefield, now Bloomsbury). In 2021, Routledge published two additional books: Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations, and a co-edited collection The Economics of Empire. She is at work on two scholarly collections, both in contract: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Reparations (Liverpool UP 2026) and The Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison (2026). A single-author monograph is also under development: Five Literary Rocks and a Geologic Tropology of Imperial Debt: The Case for Reparations for Empire. A thoroughgoing look at reparatory justice, it develops four case studies on Partition—Ireland, South Asia, Sudan, Palestine-Israel—as evidentiary material for the interminable life of colonial extractivism, for the reparations case, and to argue for the development of a solidarity movement within the decolonizing world that is fully global and sustained.
Before entering academia, Maureen managed a twenty-year career in the corporate world while raising her children on her own, Dr. Cynthia Fadem, a geoarchaeologist, and Brooklyn restaurateur Mike Fadem. She lives in Kew Gardens, Queens.
Courses
Maureen is a member of the Honors faculty and often teaches Writing Intensive and Civic Engagement designated courses. She most often teaches college composition: English 24 and 93, most recently, and English 12 numerous times in past years. Professor Fadem also teaches various literature courses, including English 30, Introduction to Literature; English 32, World Literature; English 40, The Short Story; and English 77, The Roots of Black Literature. Starting in Spring 2015, Maureen will begin teaching courses in the Early College Program at Leon M. Goldstein High School.
Education
2012: PhD in English Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY – PhD Program in English
Selected Publications and/or Other Resources
The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
“Provincializing the Nation-State: The Meaning of Partition.” In Synthesis, Special issue on “Living through the Interregnum." Volume 8, Fall 2014.
“Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin’s ‘Other at the Edge of Life.’” Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond the Nation. Eds. James P. Byrne, Padraig Kirwan and Michael O’Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 291 - 312.
Review Article: “’Poetry is Not a Luxury’: Meena Alexander’s Raw Silk.” Semicerchio, XXXII – XXXIII (September 2005): 129 – 131.
“The Interval.” Word. On Being a [Woman] Writer. Ed. Jocelyn Burrell. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004: 180 – 201.
Review: Yann Martel, Life of Pi. South Asian Review, 24 (December 2003): 231 – 233.
"Sparrows and Hawks: Class, Gender and the Politics of Decolonization in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.” South Asian Review, 23.2 (2002): 12 – 13.
“Translation, An Art of Negativity: A Conversation with Meena Alexander.” Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, 45.2 (Spring/Summer 2002): 102 – 110.
Research Interests
Maureen's research is on Postcolonial Literature (especially that of Ireland, South Asia, Israel and Palestine), Partition Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and Literary Theory.
Institutional Affiliations / Professional Societies
Current Memberships: the Modern Language Association (MLA); the American Conference
for Irish Studies (ACIS).
Executive Committee Member for 1-year term, South Asian Literary Association, 2000
– 2001.