Speakers

Keynote Speakers:

• Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. A poet and theorist, he conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics, and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (U of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014); The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015); The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); and a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke UP, 2017, 2018). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). In 2016 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society. In 2014, Moten’s The Feel Trio was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was winner of the California Book Award; in 2016 his The Little Edges was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Hilton Als, Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University, theater critic for the New Yorker magazine, and Pulitzer winning author.
Als has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received the Lambda Literary Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, as well as the Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. In 2017, Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal.
Als’ first book, The Women was published in 1996, and his book White Girls was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art and has curated Alice Neel, Uptown and God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.

Panelist Speakers:

1. Stephen M. Best is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Film and Media and a member of the Critical Theory designated emphasis. He is the author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (U of Chicago Press, 2004) and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke UP, 2018). He has co-edited two special issues of Representations: Special Issue, #108: “The Way We Read Now” (Fall 2009) and Special Issue #92: “Redress” (Fall 2005), which won “Best Special Issue for 2006” from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
2. Nicholas Boggs teaches in the Department of English at New York University. He is co-editor (with Jennifer DeVere Brody) of Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018), James Baldwin’s collaboration with French painter Yoran Cazac. His writing has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, Callaloo, and James Baldwin Now, and he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the States, Bloomsbury UK, and Editions Seuil in France. 
3. Rich Blint is Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of the Undergraduate Minor in Race and Ethnicity, The New School. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (2014) and wrote the introduction and notes for an e-book Baldwin for Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for a Time of Sorrow and Struggle (2016). His forthcoming monograph is titled A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture, and he is the editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of James Baldwin, currently under development for the Modern Language Association.  
4. Mary Campbell is Associate Professor of Art History, University of Tennessee. She is the author of Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (U of Chicago Press, 2016) and is working on a book on the art of Beauford Delaney. A lawyer as well as an art historian, Campbell continues to publish in legal journals.
5. Indie A. Choudhury is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University and a Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity. Her forthcoming dissertation project is a monograph on Frank Bowling, and her work had been published in NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Panorama,and the Royal Academy Chronicle.
6. Shawn Anthony Christian is Associate Professor of English and African American studies at Wheaton College (MA). He is author of The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader. His writings on James Baldwin, the Harlem Renaissance, and African American literary and print cultures appear in MAWA Review, Ethnic Studies Review, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and the volumes Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era and The Harlem Renaissance Revisited.
7. Keith Clark is Professor of English and African and African American Studies at George Mason University. He is the author of The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State UP, 2013) and Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines and August Wilson (2002). He is editor of Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama (2001).  His critical and pedagogical essays and book reviews have appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Resources for American Literary Study, American Writers V, and Modern Drama.
8. Rachel Cohen is Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing, University of Chicago. She is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (forthcoming FSG, May 2020), Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Writers and Artists, winner of PEN / Jerard Fund Award. Her essays on artists and writers – their friendships, fallings out, and the work they make – have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Art in America, Apollo Magazine, McSweeney’s and Best American Essays.  Cohen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
9. Michelle Commander is Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Commander is the author of numerous articles on Black literature and culture and the book Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke UP, 2017).
10. Marc Dudley is Associate Professor of English at the North Carolina State University. He is the author of Hemingway, Race, and Art (2012) and Understanding James Baldwin (2019), and is the co-editor of the forthcoming collection Hemingway and Film.
11. Michele Elam is William Robertson Coe Professor in Humanities, Department of English, Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Associate Director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. Her books include Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge UP, 2003), The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford UP, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (Ed., 2015). “Making Race in the Age of AI” is her most recent book project.
12. Monika Gehlawat is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the author of the forthcoming In Defense of Dialogue: Reading Habermas and Postwar American Literature (2020) as well as numerous essays in such journals as The James Baldwin Review, Word&Image, Contemporary Literature, and Soundings.
13. David Leeming is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Leeming served as James Baldwin’s assistant for many years and is the author of an authorized biography of Baldwin, James Baldwin: A Biography (Arcade, 1994) and the only biography of Beauford Delaney to date, Amazing Grace: The Life of Beauford Delaney (Oxford UP, 1998). He is coauthor of Gods, Heroes, and Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain and the author of numerous books on mythology, including The Oxford Companion to World Mythology.
14. D. Quentin Miller is Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston and is the author/editor of three books on James Baldwin, most recently James Baldwin in Context (Cambridge UP, 2019). He has also published more than two dozen articles or reference volume entries on Baldwin and organized two conferences on Baldwin (Boston, 2009 and Montpellier, France, 2013). He is co-editor of the recently published literature anthologies The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature (12th edition) and Literature to Go (4th edition) [Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020].
15. Walton M. Muyumba is Associate Professor of American and African Diasporic Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (University of Chicago Press). His personal and critical essays have appeared in Oxford American, The Chicago Tribune, The Crisis, The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, New Republic, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He has also published scholarship in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, College Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice.
16. Robert O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Columbia University. O’Meally is the founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies and is the author of The Romare Bearden Reader; Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction; The Craft of Ralph Ellison; Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday; The Jazz Singers; and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture; Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz; The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor); and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.
17. Ed Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His newest book is the novel Another Kind of Madness. He has published nine other books, the most recent and relevant being Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener (2016).
18. Levi Prombaum is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He has contributed art criticism to journals and collections, including the forthcoming Beauford Delaney: Through the Unusual Door, ed. by Stephen Wicks. He serves on the editorial collective of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.
19. Robert Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he has published four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016); Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001); and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007). His essays have appeared in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, Afterimage, Small Axe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, The African American Review, Feminist Formations, Art in America, and Radical America. He is the recipient of a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his forthcoming work, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique.
20. Tyler Schmidt is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY. He is the author of Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2013).
21. Abbe Schriber is a doctoral candidate in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is finishing a dissertation on the work of David Hammons. She has published articles in Arts, Women & Performance, and the collection David Hammons as well as catalogue essays and art criticism in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, Black Refractions: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, and The Shadows Took Shape: Afrofuturism and Contemporary Art and in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail.
22. Miller Wilbourn is a first-year PhD student in English at the University of Texas at Austin studying 20th- century American and African American literature with a focus on the work of James Baldwin and post-secular expressions of faith.
23. Sarah Winstein-Hibbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia completing her dissertation “American Charisma: Race and Affect, Text and Performance, 1960-2018” and is author of “A Critical Regionalist Reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Rethinking Magical Realism through Afro-Caribbean Oral Narrative,” MELUS (April 2019).
24. Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies at University of Michigan. Her books include Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France (2018), James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009; MLA prize winner) and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (1995), as well as the edited and co-edited collections Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism (1998); The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (2001); and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (2004).

Host:

Amy J. Elias is Lindsay Young Professor of English and Director of the UT Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author more than thirty articles and chapters concerning contemporary arts and of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2002, winner of the Perkins Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative) and co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century (Northwestern 2015) and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). She is the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal, which has won three national journal awards, and was the principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.