Convened by Dr. Patricia A. Matthew, dialogues are scheduled for March 10th, March 24th, April 14th, and April 21st.

Lisa Lowe and Simon Gikandi in dialogue about the archive, history, and contemporary art.

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Lisa Lowe received her B.A. in History from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor and Chair of English at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies. Before that he was Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the director of the Program in Comparative Literature. Gikandi was elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2016. He  was the first vice-president of the MLA in 2018 and became the association’s president in 2019. He served as editor of PMLA, the official journal of the MLA, from 2011 to 2016.

Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Gikandi earned his BA in literature, with first-class honors from the University of Nairobi. As a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, he graduated with an MLitt in English studies. He has a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

Gikandi’s major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, African philology, and cultures of the novel.

Convener: Dr. Patricia A. Matthew, UB CDI Distinguished Visitin Scholar, associate professor of English at Montclair State University, is a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture and an expert on faculty diversity and inclusion. She is the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press). Her work has also been published in journals including European Romantic Review, Women’s Writing, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and PMLA and in the art and culture magazines The Atlantic and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her diversity and inclusion work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education,  The Los Angeles Review of Books,  and New York Public Radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show.  She regularly leads workshops, delivers keynotes, and shares her research in public lectures. She is currently writing a book on sugar, protest, and British abolitionist culture and writing a series of essays on race and contemporary adaptations of Jane Austen’s world.

Sponsored by
The Boston University Center for the Humanities and the Univ. at Buffalo College of Arts & Sciences, Humanities Institute, and James H. McNulty Chair of English Myung Mi Kim

Presented by Boston Area Romanticist Colloquium and the University at Buffalo