Rate My Professor Rachel Mordecai

Rachel Mordecai is Professor of Caribbean Literature in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches Literature courses with a focus on the Caribbean. She earned a BA from Brandeis University, an MA from the University of the West Indies (Mona), and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Mordecai joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 2008. Her teaching portfolio includes Engl-Writ 112 College Writing, Engl 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture, Engl 200 Intro to Literary Studies, Engl 300 Caribbean Women Writers, Engl 300 Caribbean Revolutions and Their Afterlives, Engl 300 Caribbean Family Sagas, Engl 372 Caribbean Literature, Engl 372H Caribbean-British Connections, Engl 491 Autobiography of the Americas, Engl 494 Pulp Caribbean, Engl 494SI Literature and Social Justice, Engl 791 Intro to Caribbean Literature, Engl 891 Caribbean Family Sagas, and Engl 892 Caribbean Cultural Theory. She employs discussion-based teaching techniques, collaborative thought-mapping, and alternative grading methods to promote critical and creative thinking, modeling radical openness to multiple ideas and viewing writing as a learning process. Mordecai received the Distinguished Teaching Award for 2024-2025 from the Center for Teaching & Learning, and is a former Lilly Teaching Fellow and Instructional Innovation Fellow.

Mordecai's research interests encompass 20th- and contemporary literature, African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, American, Atlantic, and hemispheric studies, as well as colonial, postcolonial, and transnational frameworks. Her specializations include Caribbean and African Diaspora literature, hemispheric American literature, and popular literature and culture of the Caribbean. She authored Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture (University of the West Indies Press, 2014) and has published articles on Jamaican popular fiction, Peter Tosh’s iterations of black citizenship, Lawrence Scott’s amnesiac white creole women, and figurations of blackness in Margaret Cezair-Thompson and Robert Antoni. Her current book project is tentatively titled “No Ancestry Except the Black Water”: A Study of Caribbean Family Sagas. Since 2019, she has served as Editor of sx salon, a Small Axe literary platform. In 2024, Mordecai and Kiran Asher received a Mutual Mentoring Grant for "Mentoring Our (Older)selves to Sustain Our Thinking and Writing." Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she identifies as a Caribbean Caribbeanist and participates in the Environmental and Social Action Movement at UMass Amherst.