Archive
literature
‘Wayward’ Mythography: Zora Neale Hurston and Ancient Greece
Justine McConnell, Monica L. Miller, and Rosa Andújar
Join us for the Natalie Boymel Kampen Memorial Lecture with Justine McConnell, McMillan-Stewart Fellow at Harvard University and Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. McConnell's lecture, “‘Wayward’ Mythography: Zora Neale Hurston and Ancient Greece,” will be followed by a conversation co-moderated by Monica Miller (Africana Studies, Barnard) and Rosa Andújar (Classics, Barnard). The event will conclude with a Q&A with audience members.
Read More“Brown Sugar Makes the World Go ‘Round”: A Conversation with Kim F. Hall on The Sweet Taste of Empire
Oct 6, 2025
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 […]
Read MoreSaul Williams on Black Experimentation, Fugitive Pedagogies, and the Art of Resistance
Saul Williams and Shana L. Redmond
Poet, musician, filmmaker, actor and intellectual Saul Williams discusses the relationships between aesthetic forms and political education in conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Reflecting on practices of Black experimentation—in language, music, and film—this dialogue explores the various sites of enclosure and foreclosure, from the nation state to the university, that bear upon the present and what practices are necessary to enact more just futures.
Read MoreBeyond the Shores: Tamara J. Walker on Black Americans Abroad
Jun 30, 2025
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 […]
Read MoreA quantum life: Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Audre Lorde
Mar 31, 2025
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 […]
Read MoreThe Way You Make Me Funny
Nina Sharma, author of The Way You Make Me Feel
How can humor be feminist? How can humor help us tell the hard truths?
Read MoreTrans Literature Now
Kay Gabriel, Denne Michele Norris, Casey Plett, and C. Riley Snorton, moderated by Jo Livingstone
Organized by the National Book Critics Circle and co-sponsored by BCRW, a conversation about the world of trans literature today.
Read MoreMinor Detail: The Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Salon in Honor of Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli, Madeleine Thien, and Layli Long Soldier discuss Shibli's haunting novel, Minor Detail.
Read MoreS&F Literary Spotlight: Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi
Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi
Join award-winning writers Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness Like Water, and Akwaeke Emezi, author of Freshwater, in a conversation on literary approaches to history, archives, and memory, moderated by Yvette Christiansë.
Read MoreThe Argonauts: A Salon in Honor of Maggie Nelson
Featuring Maggie Nelson in conversation with Christina Crosby, Saidiya Hartman, Sam Huber, and Heather Love. Moderated by Tina Campt.
Read MoreGloria Joseph and Naomi Jackson: Caribbean Feminisms on the Page
A conversation with Gloria Joseph and Naomi Jackson. Moderated by Kaiama L. Glover.
Read MoreThe Argonauts: A Salon in Honor of Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson, Christina Crosby, Saidiya Hartman, Sam Huber, and Heather Love
ABOUT THE EVENT In her widely acclaimed memoir, The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes, “There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.” Defying traditional genres, Nelson powerfully weaves theory into a narrative of queer relations and family-making, juxtaposing such supposed opposites as transgressive and normative politics, reproductive and sodomitical motherhood, intellectual and domestic […]
Read More