Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Dr. Mark W. Deets , an Assistant Professor of African and World History and the Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at The American University in Cairo. His research and teaching focus on 19 th and 20th century West African social and cultural history, especially in the Senegambian region. His first book, A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in...

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Marlene Daut , she is a Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University and author of the recently published book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution . She is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press, co-editor of Global Black History at Public Books , and has been a featured writer in various magazines an...

This discussion is with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha , an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies. Previously, Dr. Nwokocha held a...

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous re...

This discussion is with Dr. Isaac Joslin who holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Francophone Studies. Currently Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies and Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, he has travelled extensively for research in Francophone Africa in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Burundi. His research interests include Post...

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Tina Post , an Assistant Professor of English and Theater and Performance at the University of Chicago. Her recent first monograph, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression , is the first book in NYU Press’s new Minoritarian Aesthetics series. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Modern Drama, TDR: The Drama Review, International Review of African American Ar...

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad , she is the author of Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017). She is the Visiting Professor of Buddhism and Black Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she teaches classes on Buddhism and social justice. She formerly taught classes in philosophy an...

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African & African American Studies and of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, as well as a co-director of the “From Slavery to Freedom” (FS2F) Franklin Humanities Lab. A scholar of black cultural production and visual representation, Cobb is the author of two monographs, Picture Freedom:  Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth...

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Darieck Scott, a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  His book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was the winner of the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies of the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novel...

John Drabinski hosts this conversation with Perry Zurn , who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. In addition to dozens of articles on key figures and issues in the European philosophical tradition, Perry has edited three volumes: with Andrew Dilts, Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition , publis...

This discussion is with Mari Crabtree , who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.  Mari has published on African American history and culture, with particular emphasis on trauma, the history of lynching, and critical aspects of African American humor. Along with a number of articles, she recently published My Soul is a Wit...

This discussion is with Shanna Greene Benjamin , who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has published widely on African American literary and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on Black women’s literature and intellectual history. Along with numerous articles, she recently published Half in Shadow: The Life...

John E. Drabinski hosts a conversation with Stefanie Dunning , Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The author of numerous essays on African American literature and culture, Stefanie has authored two books: Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture , published by Indiana University Press in 2009 and Black to Nature: Pa...

John E. Drabinski hosts a discussion with Sarah Jane Cervenak , who teaches in the departments of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of a number of critical essays on African American art and literature with particular focus on Black feminist writing and performance, and has written two books - Wandering...

This discussion is with Dr. Andrea Davis , she is an Associate Professor at York University,Toronto in the Department of Humanities and the Academic Convenor of the 2023 Congress of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She teaches and supervises in literatures and cultures of the Black Americas and holds cross-appointments in the graduate programs in English; Interdisciplinary St...

This conversation is with Margret Grebowicz and Kiff Bamford , editors of a new collection of essays entitled Lyotard and Critical Practice , published in late-2022 by Bloomsbury. Margret teaches political theory at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of scholarly and popular media pieces, ranging from French critical theory to reflections on mountain climbin...

A conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, associate professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has written widely in popular and scholarly venues on African American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on the Black feminist tradition, queer theory, and twentieth and twenty first century literary and cultural works. Mecca is the author of...

This discussion is with Professor Christopher Freeburg , Dr. Freeburg is the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Dr. Freeburg is an award-winning author of three scholarly books and numerous articles including, Melville in the Idea of Blackness (Cambridge UP, 2012), Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (University of Virginia Pres...

This conversation is with Habiba Ibrahim , who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In addition to a number of published articles on African American literature and cultural studies, Ibrahim co-edited with Badia Ahad a 2022 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly organized around the theme “ Black Temporality in Times of Crisis .” She is the author...

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Nicholas Harrison , he is a Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at King’s College London. During his student years he worked as a teacher at the university of Tunis, at a school in rural Quebec, and at the ENS in Paris. He returned to the UK to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1992. There he began work on francopho...

This conversation is with Rinaldo Walcott , who teaches in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto, where he is the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (1997), Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (2000), Queer Returns: Essays on Multicult...

This discussion is with Dr. Felisa Vergara Reynold , an Associate Professor of French for the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Her focus is on literature in French from the Antilles, West Africa, and North Africa. She primarily works on the legacy and impact of colonialism on literature in French, from t...

This discussion is with Dr. Brian Valente-Quinn , he is an associate professor of Francophone African Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the histories and politics of theatrical performance in West Africa, and especially the stage’s interplay with questions of decoloniality, Pan-Africanism, popular culture, and forms of activist performance. In this discussion w...

Today’s conversation is with Bruce Janz , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, where he also co-directs the Center for Humanities and Digital Research . In addition to dozens of articles, he is the editor of a special journal issue with History of Intellectual Culture on space and interdisciplinarity and a volume with Springer titled Place, Space, and H...

This conversation is with Nick Bromell , Professor Emeritus in the English Department at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. Bromell is the author of numerous articles on 19th and 20th century literature and politics, and has edited the Norton Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom , as well as a collection of essays under the title The Political Companion to W...