Speaking Gigs & Conferences

- 2023 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Lecture: “Homo Narrans: Mapping Fictions of the ‘Human’ in Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Science & Contemporary Afro-Diasporic Art”

- 2022 Lenfert Center for the Arts; Performance Piece: “Transformations” at “Remembering Possibility: A Symposium Honoring Marianne Hirsch”

- 2019 Center for the Study of Social Difference; Just Three podcast with host Catherine LaSota

- 2019 Mexico City, Mexico; the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics's Encuentro working group leader: "Decolonizing Memory, Ludically Unsettling Space and Time" 

- 2019 University of Padova: Talk One: “Re-remembering Slavery and its Afterlives.” Talk Two: “Searching for Liberation: Black Lives, White Futurity, and the Politics of Mattering”

- 2019 Paris, France: Reid Hall; presentation for “Maryse Condé, A Writer for our Times” entitled “Disorderly Freedom: Maryse Condé and the Cannibal Women”

- 2019 Columbia University; chaired a panel for the conference: “Slavery, Authorship, and Literary Culture”

- 2018 Columbia University; organized & presented at Roundtable Conference: “Decolonizing Memory Studies.” Personal presentation: “Haunting Versaille: Fugitive Mappings and 'Sub-Imposed' Memories"

- 2018 Columbia University; Office of Academic Diversity Research Collective Conference presentation: "The Racial Logic of the Human (or how a girl becomes a ship)"

- 2017 Frankfurt, Germany; Annual Mnemonics Conference on "The Social Life of Memory." Personal presentation: "The Medusa Complex: Contending with Wound as Subjectivity in Maryse Condé’s Célanire Cou-Coupé and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power"

- 2017 Paris, France; conference on “Slavery, Memory, and Literature.” Personal presentation: “Fabricated in the Belly of the Ship: Representing the Enslaved in Enlightenment-era and Contemporary Literature”

- 2016 Columbia University; organized conference: "Rethinking the Text: An Interdisciplinary Discussion between literary scholars on the nonliterary object" with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Brent Edwards, Alex Gil, & Marianne Hirsch

- 2014 Martinique; presented at two festivals: “Lire et Dire pour le Plaisir” & “Contes et musique dans la cite” 

- 2010 - Present: 5 E's of Excellence package presentation given at various schools across the country (see debut novel page for more details)

For more information on published academic & fictional works, see here.