Dear Colleagues,  

Please join the Center for the Study of the Novel on Friday, May 14th at 10:00 AM PST for our final event of the academic year: Anti-Racist Pedagogies of the Novel. We will be receiving papers from three distinguished guest scholars:

Chris Freeburg is the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books Melville and the Idea of Blackness (2012) and Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (2017) treat the moral and existential task of navigating race in American cultural history. His most recent book, Counterlife (2020) extends these questions to theories of social life and social death in grappling with the legacies of slavery.

Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, and professor in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg. His books On the Postcolony (2001), A Critique of Black Reason (2016), and Necropolitics (2019) provide indispensable frames for conducting work in postcolonial studies and Black studies in the 21st century.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is a professor of Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and will soon assume an appointment at the University of Michigan. Her work attends to the representation of people of color in young adult and children’s literature, and her book The Dark Fantastic (2019) attends to reader responses of entrenched racial symbolism present in science fiction and fantasy genre conventions.

We are looking forward to this ever-timely reconsideration of our teaching practices, and hope you will join us. 

The event will take place via Zoom, on May 14th at 10AM PST. This is the link to register advance, and this is the link to our website for more information. 

The event is free and open to the public.