The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to a 2025/2026 Guest Speaker Lecture featuring Dr. Kevin Quashie, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of English at Brown University.
This lecture can be attended either in-person or online via Zoom. Please be sure to register using the link below. This lecture is open to everyone.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ).
Talk Abstract
What can it mean when a speaker or a poem says “here,” this small indexical term that is at once insistent and elusive? Considering some examples from black literature, this talk will use the magic of here to explore the relationship between three things: the act and idea of reading, the conceptualization of literature, and enduring questions of black criticism.
About the Speaker
Dr. Kevin Quashie is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of English at Brown University. He is the author or editor of four books, most notably The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for best overall book from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022).
