Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Puerto Rican academic who specializes in research of the Caribbean. She holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair at Vassar College.
In 1981, Paravisini-Gebert began her career teaching as an associate professor in the interdisciplinary Puerto Rican studies program at City University of New York in Brooklyn. Ten years later, she moved to Vassar College, teaching Caribbean culture and literature. Caribbean studies first began to emerge in the middle of the 1980s, and Paravisini-Gebert's career has sought to provide study and future scholarship regarding the cultural and environmental history of the region. She has argued that studies of the region must encompass a broad understanding of both the shared and separate histories of the islands in the region, as those focusing too narrowly on commonalities or post-colonial theory miss the complexities of the cultures. Works, such as Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Decolonizing Feminism: The Home-Grown Roots of Caribbean Women's Movements explored these complexities and how race relations and the drive for self-determination shaped women's lives. In her early career, Paravisini-Gebert brought together women literary figures from throughout the region to both raise awareness of their works and compare and contrast the different socio-economic-political factors that shaped their perspectives. In works such as El placer de la palabra: literatura erótica femenina de América Latina; antología crítica, Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women, and Caribbean Women Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, she and her co-writers brought together a diverse group of women's writings which address the neglect of scholarship on women authors of Latin America and Caribbean, who often were known in their lifetimes and obscured after their deaths. Richard D. Woods, a specialist in Iberoamerican Studies at Trinity University noted that Caribbean Women Novelists was one of the first collections of women writers from throughout the region, filling a void in information on women writers. In addition to her works on women's literature, Paravisini-Gebert has studied art and religious practices, including Creole religions in the Caribbean. Such works as Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean and Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora using a multi-disciplinary approach to evaluate cultural and linguistic patterns that connect art and religious practices in the region. From 2009 to 2012, she was the director of Environmental Studies at Vassar and her works expanded perceptions of the field through interdisciplinary research, which confirmed that rather than simply a hard scientific field, environmental studies had broader applicability. For example, in works such as Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Literature and Culture and Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures'' she evaluated how the plantation culture and modern development have reshaped the Caribbean environment.
