Event Overview

This annual lecture offers an opportunity for the Princeton community to reflect on the current and future direction of the field of African American Studies. Its aim is to bring scholars who are thinking at the cutting edge of the discipline and who are taking up vexing questions about its past, current, and future trajectories. The lecture exemplifies the role of the department as a model for African American Studies for the 21st century.

Is it necessary and urgent to reach beyond disciplinary formations that silo the thought and being of black, indigenous and other peoples of color into discrete frameworks of knowledge in order to imagine and build new solidarities and resistance movements for the future? 

About the Speaker

Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and Honorary Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She is currently the Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College and has been appointed as Centennial Professor at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute for 2022-23.

Her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019) was selected as one of the “Books of the Year for 2019,” by the Times Literary Supplement and was awarded the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, in 2020. #1 of “Top Ten Books About Aftermath of Empire,” Madeline Bunting, The Guardian July 14 2021.

Author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999); Race Men (1998); Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987); Hazel Carby is also a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).

Recent Honors:

• DeVane Medal, Yale Phi Beta Kappa, 2021
• Elected Honorary Fellow Learned Society of Wales, 2021
• Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, ASA, 2020.
• Highly Commended for the PEN Hessell -Tiltman Prize, 2020
• Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters awarded from Wesleyan University, 2019.
• Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award, Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2019.
• Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American Literature, MLA ,2016

Recent Articles:

• “Imperial Intimacies – further thoughts,” Small Axe, 64, March 2021: 198-203.
• “Between Black and White,” London Review of Books, 43, 2, January 2021
• “Black Futurities: Shapeshifting Beyond the Limits of the Human” Invisible Culture, 31,
• November 2020 https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/black-futurities/
• “The National Archives,” Invisible Culture, 31, November 2020
• https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-national-archives/
• “Peine forte et dure: Punishment by Pressing,” London Review of Books 30 July 2020: 10.
• “Safe? At Home? Feminist Review, 06 July 2020
• https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/safe-at-home/
• "A war half won,” The Guardian (Weekend) 16 November 2019, pp. 62-63

Open To All

>> Register to Attend via Zoom <<

 Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture will be entirely virtual.

Due to current University COVID guidelines, the in-person portion of the program is open only to Princeton students, faculty, and staff currently in the testing protocol.