The Department of English and Comparative Literature’s Critical Speaker Series will be hosting Alexander Weheliye as the spring semester’s first speaker. Weheliye’s lecture and graduate seminar, titled “Black Life/SchwarzSein,” will be held at 3:30 pm on February 1 and 2nd respectively via Zoom.
Visit the event page to register.
Alexander G. Weheliye is currently at work on two projects. The first, Modern Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. DuBois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the marginal as central to the workings of modern civilization. The second, Feenin: R&B’s technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970s.
“Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014, Duke UP).”