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Join us on Monday, September 28th at 5:00 PM in East É«½äÖ±²¥ 209 for a public lecture by Dr. Hortense Spillers, a black feminist thinker of unparalleled influence and a foundational figure in African American literary and cultural theory. Reception to follow. RSVP required (please click the "More event information" button to access the RSVP form).

Talk title: Oedipal Deferral: Implications of the Middle Passage

Hortense J. Spillers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Emerita, at Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University and has held appointments at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory University, and Cornell University. Her visiting positions include É«½äÖ±²¥ University's Program in Literature and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Spillers' scholarship spans American and African American literature, Black feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism. Her influential essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," is widely cited across disciplines and continues to shape the study of race, gender, and power. She is the author of Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture and co-editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. She served as a period editor for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and edited Comparative American Identities for the English Institute series. She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, with additional support from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. A member of the boundary 2 editorial collective, she has also served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association. Among her many honors are the Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award, the Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022), and an honorary doctorate from Yale University (2024). She resides in Nashville, Tennessee.