Megan Cole Paustian

Megan Cole Paustian teaches courses in literature, race studies, gender studies, and academic writing. She also serves as co-coordinator of the Race and Ethnic Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2013, where she was recognized as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow. Her research focuses on the relationship between literature and humanitarian thought with a focus on African fiction. She is the author of Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination, which was published by Fordham University Press in 2024. The book begins from the premise that humanitarianism has a narrative problem and argues that the novel—with its profound sensitivity to narrative—can enrich the critique of white saviorism in Africa while also envisioning more ethical forms of international responsibility. 

Selected Scholarship

Book:

Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination, Fordham University Press, January 2024.

Articles:

“Giving a Global Account of Oneself: Narratives of the Humanitarian Atlantic.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, December 2024, pp. 178-201.

“Laughing through the Mask in Invisible Man.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 49, no. 3, Fall 2024, pp. 69-94. (honorable mention for the 1921 Prize in American Literature for 2024)

"Humanitarianism's Narrative Problem and its Missionary History," Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa, April 2024.

“Dogs, Whiteness, and the Politics of African Humanity.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67, no. 3, 2021, pp. 443-467. (winner of the Margaret Church Memorial Prize)

“A Postcolonial Theory of Universal Humanity: Bessie Head’s Ethics of the Margins.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 343-362.

“‘A Real Heaven on Their Own Earth’: Religious Missions, African Writing, and the Anticolonial Imagination.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 45, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1-25.

“Living Beyond Apartheid: The Territorial Ethics of Reconciliation.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, pp. 101-122.

Courses Taught

Black Narrative

Black Lives Matter: Race, Writing, and the History of Protest

Feminism, Gender, and Queer Theory

Introduction to English

First-Year Seminar: Writing

Multicultural American Literature

Gender and Literary Feminisms

How to Read Stories and Novels

Theories of Race and Ethnicity