Helen Kapstein

Faculty Fellow

Helen Kapstein is a tenured postcolonial scholar in the English Department at John Jay College, CUNY. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her areas of interest include South African literature and culture, cultural and media studies, and tourism and museum studies. Her current projects include A New Kind of Safari, on islands, tourism, and nation-building, a series of articles on hysteria as a mode of transitional resistance, and a project on Nigerian short stories as saboteurs of the petroleum industry’s agenda. Her work has appeared in English Studies in Canada, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and Studies in the Humanities, among other venues.

Participating Years

2014–2015

After Debt: New Forms of Dependency, Obligation, Risk, and Credit

‘After Debt’ imagines a world beyond debt and pursues it as a research agenda across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. How have economic failures been transformed into personal identities, often dividing those deemed “at risk” from those capable of assuming risk? How might we understand histories of debt within genealogies of the fiscal military nation-state? What alternate meanings of dependency, obligation, risk, and credit have people produced within and against debt regimes, such as those enforced by structural adjustment?