Race & Ethnicity Colloquium

Welcome!

Welcome to the homepage for the English Department's Graduate Colloquium on Race and Ethnicity. 

The Race and Ethnicity Colloquium aims to provide a lively forum for graduate students interested in studying literary and rhetorical practices as they concern theoretical, historical, and critical considerations of race, racialization, and ethnicity. While the study of race and literature is our nominal focus, the colloquium emphatically embraces the porosity of these intellectual concerns by placing importance on interdisciplinary, transnational, and transperiodic approaches. We hope to accomplish this goal in three ways: by building community among graduate students, by inviting relevant guest speakers to present ground-breaking research, and by giving graduate students opportunities to workshop their own research. Recent programming has included reading groups, graduate student workshops, and guest talks from faculty from a wide range of disciplines and institutional ranks. 

Please check back for more information about our upcoming events. In the meantime, please feel free to get in touch with questions or suggestions! 

Looking forward,

Jordan Taliha McDonald and Wyatt Sarafin

Race and Ethnicity Colloquium Co-Coordinators

Glenda Carpio and Jesse McCarthy

Race and Ethnicity Colloquium Faculty Sponsors

UPCOMING EVENTS

Fall 2024

Reading Group

This semester, we are returning to our article reading group series as an exercise in familiarizing graduate students with the lanscape of current scholarship at the intersection of literary studies and critical race studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature. 

October [Date TBA]

Reading: "The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century" by Alex Moskowitz (Currently Top 5 "Most Read" Academic Article in Novel: A Forum on Fiction)

November 

Reading: TBA

Speakers

September 18, 2024

Guest Speaker: Noémie Ndiaye (UChicago), "How to Enslave an Unenslavable Person: Afro-Muslim Dissociations in Early Modern Drama."

Co-sponsored by the Renaissance and Theater and Performance Colloquiums.

Spring 2024

Speakers

April 18, 2024 

Guest Speaker: Lee Edelman (Tufts), "Illegible: Race, Sex, Psychoanalysis" 

April 12, 2024 

Guest Speaker: Parisa Vaziri (Cornell), "The Wynter of Autopoeisis" 

Fall 2023

Reading Group

This semester, we did an article reading group and close-read Rizvana Bradley's  “On Black Aesthesis” 

Speakers

October 25, 2023

Guest Speaker: Matthieu Chapman, SUNY New Paltz,  Book Reading: Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life

November 16, 2023

Guest Speaker: Cecilio M. Cooper, Folger Institute, “Benthic, Below” 

Spring 2023

Speakers

March 31 at 12:00p.m.

Guest Speaker: Ren Ellis Neyra (Wesleyan), "Figurative Limits"

Fall 2022

Reading Group

We're reading Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning In An Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Book Club Meetings are (tentatively) scheduled for Wednesdays at 6:30 pm in Barker 012. 

For Book Club resources, see R&E's Google Drive

Speakers

December 8 

Guest Speaker: Smaran Dayal (Stevens Institute of Technology), "Agency Under Duress: Subjectivity and Resistance in Octavia E. Butler's Fiction" 

November 16 

Guest Speaker: Kimberly Juanita Brown (Dartmouth), "Loss, Longing, and Haptic Regard"

November 11 

Guest Speaker:  Tyrone S. Palmer (Wesleyan), "Faceless Faces in the Void"

September 29 

Guest Speaker: Jonathan Howard (Yale), "The Blueness of Blackness"

Co-sponsored by the Long 20th Century Colloquium.