Performance Studies Associate Professor Alexandra Vazquez will join cultural historian Eric Lott and Ivy Wilson in conversation for Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism at CUNY.
WHEN: Monday, December 4th, 2017, 4:00p, - 6:00pm
WHERE: The Graduate Center, 365, 5th Avenue, Room 9204
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Cultural historian Eric Lott has written and lectured widely on the politics of U.S. literature, music, performance, and intellectual life. He received his Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and taught for more than twenty years at the University of Virginia, where he was director of graduate studies in English from 1997 to 2000. He has published dozens of articles, essays, and reviews in books and journals such as the Village Voice, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Social Text, PMLA, Representations, and American Quarterly. His book Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism was recently published by Harvard University Press, and he is also the author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (2006) and Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), which won the MLA’s Best First Book Prize, among other awards, and recently appeared in a twentieth-anniversary edition. He is on the editorial board of Criticism.
Alexandra T. Vazquez’s research and teaching interests focus on music, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, U.S. Latina/o and Latin American Studies, race and ethnicity, and feminist theory. Her book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Her work has been featured in the journals small axe, American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies; and in the edited volumes Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Reggaeton, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. Vazquez is currently working on a new book called Florida Water.
Ivy Wilson teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular focus on African-American culture at Northwestern University where he is associate professor of English and Art, Theory, and Practice as well as director of the Program in American Studies. He has published a number of books on nineteenth-century American literary studies including Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics (Oxford UP, 2011) and, most recently, the essay collection Unsettled States (NYU P, 2014) with Dana Luciano.