English Department to Host Black Studies Scholar Christina Sharpe for Sydney Kaplan Memorial Lecture on Oct. 3
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The UMass Amherst English Department will host its annual Sydney Kaplan Memorial Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, from 4:30-6 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center lobby. This year’s guest speaker is Christina Sharpe, professor and Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Sharpe is the author of numerous scholarly works, including "Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects" (2010) and "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being" (2016)—named 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) won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Ordinary Notes 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.
The Sydney Kaplan Memorial Lecture was established in 1995 by the English Department to present major figures in the field of American Studies.
Contact:
Hoang Gia Phan
Department of English
hgphan [at] english [dot] umass [dot] edu
413-545-5456