Kim F. Hall
Chair of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College
Kim F. Hall is the Lucyle Hook Chair of English and a Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Her research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland and holds a doctorate in sixteenth and seventeenth century English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Things of Darkness, published in 1996 by Cornell University Press, used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature. This groundbreaking work on racial discourses in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2006) offers readers visual and verbal textual materials that illuminate themes in Shakespeare’s play Othello: The Moor of Venice. She is currently working on two book projects: Sweet Taste of Empire, which examines the roles of race, aesthetics and gender in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century and a new project, Othello was My Grandfather: Shakespeare and the African Diaspora, which discusses Afrodiasporic appropriations of Othello. You can follow Professor Hall on Twitter @ProfKFH
Lewis R. Gordon
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy, with affiliations in Asian and Asian American Studies, Caribbean and Latino/a Studies, and Judaic Studies, at UCONN-Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès; Writer-in-Residence at Birkbeck School of Law; Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), where he was also most recently Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor of Political and International Studies (2014 and 2015); and Chairman of the Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, Nicolás Guillén, and Claudia Jones awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He was also recently Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics and International Studies at the university currently known as Rhodes in South Africa (2014 and 2015). A graduate of Yale University and the Lehman Scholars Program of the City University of New York, his publications include the influential monographs Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanities Press, 1995; Humanity Books, 1999), Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (Routledge, 1995), and Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), which won the Gustavus Meyer Award for Human Rights in North America. He has authored a few hundred academic journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, many of which have been translated into several languages, and interviews and essays for a variety of public forums. His most recent books are What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham UP; Wits UP; Hurst, 2015; Swedish translation, TankeKraft förlag 2016), and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). His website is: http://lewisrgordon.com, and you can follow him on twitter @lewgord