The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to the 2025/2026 Dorothy L. Black Lecture featuring Dr. Tina Post, Associate Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies, and an associate member of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts, at the University of Chicago.
Committed to education throughout her life, Dorothy L. Black earned her BA from UBC in 1952 and taught in Burnaby schools for over 40 years. A bequest from Ms. Black established the Dorothy L. Black First Year English Speakers’ Series Endowment after her passing.
This lecture can be attended either in-person or online via Zoom. Please be sure to register using the link below. The Dorothy L. Black Lecture is open to everyone, and undergraduates in EL&L programs are especially encouraged to attend.
This event is co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies (Tidalectics Studio).
Talk Abstract
Dr. Tina Post’s present research concerns coziness as an aesthetic category—that is (after Sianna Ngai) as a socially informed perception of form that is wedded to a judgement about that form. Said differently, she’s interested in how we (culturally) come to name something as cozy in the first place, and what—and whom—comes to be written into or out of that category as a consequence. This talk will suggest some of the ways that coziness comes to be constituted, and proposes some problematics that inhere in that category.
About the Speaker
Dr. Tina Post is Associate Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies, and an associate member of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts, at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present’s book prize, the John W. Frick award from the American Theatre and Drama Society, and an outstanding book award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Her academic articles have appeared in ELH, ASAP/Journal, Modern Drama, TDR/The Drama Review, and International Review of African American Art (IRAAA), as well as in the edited collections Race and Performance after Repetition and Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media. Her creative work can be found in Imagined Theaters, Stone Canoe, The Appendix, and Portable Gray. She teaches at the University of Chicago.
