A Conversation with Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere is Black
Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s new book, The Elsewhere Is Black, examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns […]
Freedom Dreaming and Worldmaking: Tourmaline and Hope Dector on Marsha P. Johnson’s Inspiring Life
Award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist Tourmaline has spent over two decades lovingly researching and preserving Marsha P. Johnson’s life. In two books published this past spring—MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, the first comprehensive biography of Johnson, and a children’s book, One Day in June—Tourmaline provides a richly textured story of […]
“Brown Sugar Makes the World Go ‘Round”: A Conversation with Kim F. Hall on The Sweet Taste of Empire
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025), centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique […]
Beyond the Shores: Tamara J. Walker on Black Americans Abroad
Barnard Professor of Africana Studies Tamara J. Walker is an experienced storyteller of elsewheres. As a historian she tells stories of the past; as a Latin Americanist she writes from outside the global north (her first book Exquisite Slaves (Cambridge University Press, 2017) examines the clothing of the enslaved in colonial Lima). As a lifelong […]
A quantum life: Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Audre Lorde
Last December, Margot Kotler sat down with Alexis Pauline Gumbs to discuss her most recent book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. They talked about the breadth of Lorde’s life and the need to think on a planetary scale, the collective work of autobiography, and the work of a poet in […]
It Has to Be Imperfect
An interview with Nina Sharma, author of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown * Nina Sharma is a writer, performer, and adjunct professor of English at Barnard College. Her writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Margins, and Longreads. Last fall […]
If We Can Imagine a Feminist World, We Can Build One
A Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican, guest editors of “Rage, Struggle, Freedom,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online On December 4th, The Scholar and Feminist Online released its newest issue “Rage, Struggle, Freedom” guest edited by feminist scholars and activists Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican. Okazawa-Rey and Sarican together make […]
Architecture of Migration: An Interview with Anooradha Siddiqi
Anooradha Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of Architecture, Barnard College, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2024). Sabrina Salam (BC ’24) is a Research Assistant at BCRW. Sabrina Salam: What critical problem do you look at in this book? Anooradha Siddiqi: I look at architecture and migration […]
Imagining Collective Care in Our Future: A Conversation with Premilla Nadasen
Premilla Nadasen is a historian of social change. Nadasen’s work has focused on organizing among poor and working-class women of color and alternative labor movements in the US. Nadasen currently serves as the Anne Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Care: The Highest […]
Political Origins: An Interview with Johanna Fernández
At the end of May, BCRW hosted its first Feminist Freedom School on the subject of feminist abolition. The Freedom School was facilitated by Sarah Haley, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, and co-organized by Premilla Nadasen, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of BCRW. I joined with ten […]
Collective Reconnection: An Interview with Sophie Lewis
Sophie Lewis came to speak at the BCRW Feminist Freedom School in June. She brought an extraordinarily calm and humble demeanor as she entered the classroom. Her arrival was eagerly awaited by participants of the freedom school as many were familiar with her book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Press, […]
“Support the Troops”: the Solider, the Citizen, and Our Ongoing Attachment to Militarism in post-9/11 America
Barnard Professor of Anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj’s recently released book Combat Trauma elucidates the ways in which a rising focus on the psychological consequences of war on American combat personnel has dovetailed with ubiquitous calls to “support the troops” so as to undermine criticisms of US militarism in the post 9/11 era. Abu El-Haj tracks […]
The Quest to “bring our people home”: A Conversation with Cara Page
Cara Page (she, her, hers) is a Black, Queer artist, organizer, and cultural worker whose people came from the Southern US and all along the Eastern seaboard. Co-creator of the Kindred Southern Justice Collective, founder of the Changing Frequencies organizing project, and former BCRW Activist in Residence, Cara has dedicated most of her life to […]
“Who do you want to talk to?”
A Conversation with Tami Navarro on Race and Gender within Neoliberal Financialization Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands, Tami Navarro’s (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Drew University and former BCRW Associate Director) first book, is an ethnographic exploration of the Economic Development Commission (EDC), a finance agency that encourages […]
Piecing the Stories Together: An interview with Celia Naylor
The Rose Hall Great House Tour takes visitors through a historic slave plantation in Montego Bay, Jamaica, telling a version of history through the sensational legend of a white plantation mistress named Annie Palmer, known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. The tour is based on the 1929 novel by Herbert G. de Lisser […]
This Flame Within: An Interview with Manijeh Moradian
In November, Manijeh Moradian (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College) published This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press), a new book on the radical organizing efforts of US-based Iranian students in the 1960-70s. The book arrives at an extraordinary moment as Iranians protest the killing of Mahsa […]