This event has been cancelled.
The Theory and Media Studies Colloquium with the Literature, Arts, & the Environment and Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies colloquia present Ecocriticism and African Diasporic Cultural Production Panel, featuring Cajetan Iheka, Axelle Karera, Sonya Posmentier, and Jennifer Wenzel.
Cajetan Iheka is associate professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on African and Caribbean literatures and film, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
Axelle Karera is an assistant professor of philosophy and African American studies at Wesleyan University. Her areas of specialization are in 20th century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race, contemporary critical theories, and the environmental humanities.
Sonya Posmentier is associate professor of English at New York University. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press and received the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and Syndicate.
Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017). A new monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, was published through Fordham in 2019.