Caresse Jackson-Alger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is interested in the literary and visual histories of Classical mythology in Italy, Greece, and the Black Atlantic. Her dissertation situates depictions of the Black body within the histories of canonical representations of Venus and Odysseus.

Caresse graduated summa cum laude from CUNY Hunter with a BA in English Literature, with departmental honors, and minors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History. She was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and is now a President's Fellow at Princeton University.

Languages

Latin, Spanish, Italian, Ancient Greek

Selected Presentations

"The Nostos to Nowhere," presented at CURRENT(S)/PEYMATA at the Princeton Athens Center, 2022

"The Odyssey in Antebellum America," a guest lecture at the University of Oregon, 2021

"Frederick Douglass and the Classics," presented at the Classics Graduate Colloquium at Ohio State University, 2020

"Madison Washington: A Black Odyssean Hero in Antebellum America," presented at Voices, the Italian Graduate Society Conference at Rutgers University, 2019

“Madison Washington: A Black Odyssean Hero in Antebellum America,” presented at the Journal of the History of Ideas Graduate Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, 2019

“Knowingness and Oedipus’ Humanity,” presented at Hunter College Undergraduate Research Conference, 2017

“Orientalism and the Dionysian in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” presented at the MMUF New York City Regional Undergraduate Conference at Hunter College, 2016

Selected Publications

"Madison Washington: A Black Odyssean Hero in Antebellum America." La Fusta 28 (2020): 56-70.

“Orientalism and the Dionysian in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” The Hunter College Journal of Philosophy (2016): 41-51.

Selected Honors and Awards

The Metropolitan Museum of Art--Interdisciplinary Fellowship

American School of Classical Studies at Athens--William Sanders Scarborough Fellowship

Eric Kahler Fellowship

Merit Grant from the Center for Human Values

The Department of African American Studies’ Tate-Taylor Prize

Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Studies Award

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow

Induction into Phi Sigma Tau, the International Honor Society for Philosophy