Dear Graduate Students, As mentioned in our previous email, we have three fantastic candidates for a new faculty hire in African American and African diasporic literature—Dr. Chamara Moore <https://nd.academia.edu/ChamaraMoore>, Dr. Maya Hislop <https://www.clemson.edu/caah/academics/english/faculty-and-staff/facultybio.html?id=2232>, and Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe <https://africana.cornell.edu/tao-leigh-goffe>. As part of their virtual campus visits this week and next week, they will each be giving a talk. Please see below for more info and the Zoom links. If you attend any of the talks, you're welcome to email me (as a member of the search committee) to share any feedback. *Wednesday, March 16, 12:15–1:30pm**Dr. Chamara Moore, "Electric Black: Race, Phenomenology, and Black Superheroes"* How can Black Speculation be used as a form of healing not only in speculative texts like Octavia Butler's *Fledgling*, but also with particularly harmful tropes like the Electric Black Superhero? This talk will explain how these tropes make light of the suffering Black people have experienced historically from harmful electrified tools of the state ranging from the tazer to the electric chair. The talk will conclude with a brief overview of how Speculative fiction creators have reinvented the phenomenology of the Black body through the speculative elements of their work in visual texts like *Black Mirror* and HBO's *Watchmen*. Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81813320597?pwd=blBwRWhxNnM5Q05pOHE5M1duRnc3dz09 *Thursday, March 17, 12:15–1:30pm**Dr. Maya Hislop, “Black Women Imagine Violence as Healing: Systems of Destructive Justice in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and State of North Carolina v. Joan Little, 1974-75”* In this talk I’ll be taking an in-depth examination of the landmark case, *State of North Carolina v. Joan Little, 1974-1975* in order to uncover a crucial reading of the criminal justice systems at work in the contemporaneous Black feminist novel, *Corregidora*. Adding to previous scholarship which often considers *Corregidora* to be a novel about trauma, I read it as a novel about transformative justice. I argue that Jones uses literature to do what the law cannot: assert a complex relationship between black women, the law, and sexual violence that dismantles binaries around agency and healing. In the remains of these dismantled binaries, the main characters of *Corregidora* showcase what I call an Afropessimistic or millenialist justice system built around failure, self-destruction, and the destruction of others. Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85070031656?pwd=aVFmOUFPMnhOM05pQ2p1QnRGaXdrUT09 *Monday, March 21, 12:15–1:30pm**Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, “Molten Black: Reading Climate, Racial Formations, and Geological Metaphors”* Environmental thought has been foundational and formative to American literature and rhetoric. Reckoning with the climate crisis, in this talk, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe will examine the uneven formations of race and racial meaning in metaphors of geology. Exploring the reading practices and literacies embedded in the rhetoric of natural history that have led to how we read race, how might we rethink Suzan-Lori Parks and George Jackson in conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin? From the 19th century Guano Age to dormant volcanoes to the very bedrock of island formations the matter of blackness erupts to the surface revealing tensions and the fault lines of racial division and hierarchy. Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87008612405?pwd=RDF4Z296OXVTb3A3eDUvc21qb0xnQT09 We are also currently doing a search for a new faculty hire in early modern studies and have three amazing finalists—Anita Raychawdhur, Dr. Hanh Bui, and Dr. Sawyer Kemp. Again, you're very welcome to join their virtual talks and send me any feedback after (see info below). *Friday, Mar 18, 11:00am–12:30pm* *Anita Raychawdhur, "Queer Witchcraft: Macbeth, King James I/VI’s Patriarchal Anxieties, and Desiring White Identity"* This talk considers the staging of queer women's kinship in William Shakespeare's *Macbeth* in relation to early modern nation and racial formation. In particular, *Macbeth* participates in the creation of a white English identity that casts out and racializes "unruly" Scots of the past through the Weird Sisters and the Macbeths, who are associated with marginal locales such as heaths and highlands. The Weird Sisters further reject normative womanhood, thus presenting an alternative to the fantasy and futurity of an English identity predicated upon legible whiteness. From the prophesying of the gender-bending witches to the moment of Macbeth’s destruction, aided by English forces, *Macbeth* allows for consideration of how Jacobean England positioned Scotland’s past as non-white and queer. Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82680897015?pwd=WkhZelZraWhhWFZua3ZwSFlNMW1EUT09 *Wednesday, March 23, 12:15–1:30pm**Dr. Hanh Bui, "Call the Midwife: Birthing Blackness in Titus Andronicus"* This paper examines a neglected context for understanding epistemologies of race in Shakespeare’s drama: the role of the midwife. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, midwives performed an important cultural function by not only assisting women in labor, but also by pronouncing the health, sex, and—most critically—paternity of an infant. As Caroline Bicks has noted, this was a time when a midwife had considerable influence over how a body was interpreted at the moment of its birth, thereby determining its reception in the community. Nowhere in Shakespeare’s canon is the midwife’s privileged authority more manifest—and threatening—than in *Titus Andronicus*, where the midwife’s role includes bearing witness to an infant’s race. After Tamora, Empress of Rome, delivers a baby fathered by her lover, Aaron the Moor, he asks the question: “how many saw the child?” By subsequently killing the birth attendants, Aaron calls attention to how controlling the destiny of his black-hued baby depends upon silencing the midwife’s knowledge. The paper further explores how narratives of foreign midwives and birthing practices in the period’s writings helped to construct the non-English as racialized “other.” Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86779729052?pwd=R09jNktpVGFtbGdVOHRTZCtpSkVMUT09 *Thursday, March 24, 12:15–1:30pm* *Dr. Sawyer Kemp, title and abstract TBA* Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87118934820?pwd=aFVXVWROci9iQUlybzk0Sm9UM3Y1Zz09 We would also like to request your help in spreading the word to your networks about our wonderful English MA program! If you know folks who may be interested in pursuing an English MA, please encourage them to apply! They can learn more about our admissions requirements here <https://qcenglish.commons.gc.cuny.edu/graduate/ma-in-english/admissions/> or email us at MAEnglish@qc.cuny.edu. We will be extending our Fall 2022 admissions deadline till July 1, BUT we were given a couple scholarships to award incoming fall students, and the priority deadline to be considered for those is April 1. Finally, a reminder to submit a proposal for our 2022 Grad Conference <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gxzuBEBGaAa_FnUR0Up6ZOnWCmHVj7xzRhvoqUYZlWM/edit?usp=sharing>! The deadline is coming up in a week and a half, *March 28*. We'll be in touch again soon with the call for the Nancy Comley Prize and with more info about Fall 2022 course offerings and preregistration (which will be happening in early April). Till then, hope you're continuing to take care! Best, Caroline & Hillary, your Directors of Graduate Studies in English -- Dr. Caroline Kyungah Hong Associate Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies (English MA) Queens College, CUNY *she/her/hers* * Please note that I am off email on weekends and will respond to your email during business hours, Monday–Friday 9am–5pm, generally within 1–2 business days.