The annual Spector Lecture is the most prestigious scholarly lecture hosted by the Department of English.
This year’s Spector Lecture will be given by Professor Christina Sharpe, one of the leading voices and most eloquent writers in the converging fields of black studies, art history, critical theory, and cultural studies. It is generously co-sponsored by Professor Alex Blue in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.
Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)—named by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction. It was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2025). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.
You can read more about Christina Sharpe’s influence on a generation of thinkers here.
The Spector Lecture will be held on March 20, 2024, from 6-8 pm in Room 100 Maxwell Cohen Moot Court at McGill University’s Law School. Seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be a seminar for graduate students and faculty the following day—more information to come soon.
Previous Spector lecturers have included distinguished scholars Marisa Parham, Jeff Dolven, Cajetan Iheka, Caroline Levine, Harry Berger, Jr., Linda Williams, Joseph Roach, Sarah Brouillette, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lauren Berlant, and Andrew Ross.
With generous support from:
