麻豆传媒网站

"On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace"

The Department of English is thrilled to announce the 2025 Spector Lecturer: Phanuel Antwi, Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Professor Antwi's talk, "On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace", stems from the research leading to his latest book On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace. Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.

Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.

Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, the book demonstrates clearly that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, which we should face with resistance and solidarity.

February 18, 2025, 6 - 8 PM
Arts W-120, 麻豆传媒网站, 853 Sherbrooke W.

Phanuel Antwi holds the and is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He is also an artist, curator, and activist, working with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled 鈥淐urrencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.鈥�

"What Could a Vessel Be: An Ongoing Consideration of the Vessel in Times of Catastrophe"

The 2024 Spector Lecture will be given by Professor Christina Sharpe, one of the leading voices and most eloquent writers in the converging fields of black studies, art history, critical theory, and cultural studies. It is generously co-sponsored by Professor Alex Blue in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.聽

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)鈥攏amed by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer鈥檚 Trust Prize in Nonfiction. It was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2025). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.

You can read more about Christina Sharpe鈥檚 influence on a generation of thinkers .

The Spector Lecture, "What Could a Vessel Be: An Ongoing Consideration of the Vessel in Times of Catastrophe", will be held on March 20, 2024, from 6-8 pm in Room 100 Maxwell Cohen Moot Court at 麻豆传媒网站鈥檚 Law School. Seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be a seminar for graduate students and faculty the following day鈥攎ore information to come soon.

Previous Spector lecturers have included distinguished scholars Marisa Parham, Jeff Dolven, Cajetan Iheka, Caroline Levine, Harry Berger, Jr., Linda Williams, Joseph Roach, Sarah Brouillette, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lauren Berlant, and Andrew Ross.

鈥淏lack Living + Other Computational Poetics鈥�

Marisa Parham is Visiting Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she serves as director for the African American Digital Humanities initiative (AADHUM), and is the associate director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She also co-directs the Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities, which is an independent workgroup for digital and experimental humanities (irLhumanities).

Parham鈥檚 current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in literary and cultural texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies. Recently published examples of this work include 鈥淪ample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,鈥� and the interactive longform scholarly essays .break .dance, and Breaking, dancing, making in the machine. She is currently developing 鈥淏lack Haints in the Anthropocene鈥�, a book-length interactive project that focuses on memory, haunting, digitality, and Black environmental experience.

Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The African-American Student鈥檚 Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She has also carried fellowships and residencies at the Huntington Library, The WEB DuBois Center at Harvard University, and the School for Criticism and Theory. From 2001 鈥� 2020 she served as Professor of English, Faculty Diversity and Inclusion officer, and Mellon Mays program advisor at Amherst College, where in 2018 she was awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Teaching award. She is also a former director (2013-2017) of Five College Digital Humanities, serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Public Lecture
鈥淏lack Living + Other Computational Poetics鈥�
When and Where:
March 8, 4-6pm, Leacock Building, Room 232

Seminar
鈥淪how and Tell: Exploring Black E-Lit鈥�
When and Where: March 9, 12-1:30pm, Arts 160.

"Taking Turns: Some Thoughts on Poetry and Conversation"

Jeff Dolven is the author of three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction, Senses of Style, and the admittedly hasty Take Care, as well as essays on a variety of subjects, from Renaissance metrics to player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in a volume, Speculative Music. He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton鈥檚 Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).