Carole Boyce-Davies
Gains and Losses Towards a Decolonized Literary Curriculum
Carole Boyce-Davies is Professor of African Diaspora Literatures and chair of the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University. As Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English (2007-2024) she was also appointed to the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters endowed chair at Cornell University. From 1997 to 2007 where she is now Professor Emerita. From 1997-2006, she served as Professor and Director of African New World Studies at Florida International University where she launched the first M.A. in African Diaspora Studies in the US. She is the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) and Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022). In addition to over a hundred essays, articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and op eds, she has also edited or co-edited thirteen critical editions of literary, Black feminist, and African Diaspora scholarship.
Robert McRuer
Keynote Title TBA
Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. Currently, he is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally. His most recent book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance, was released in January 2018. Crip Times considers locations of disability within contemporary political economies and the roles that disabled movements and representations play in countering hegemonic forms of globalization. His first book, The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities, centered on contemporary lgbt writers, particularly lgbt writers of color, and his second book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, attended to cultural sites where critical queerness and disability contest heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness.