Talks

Selected Talks

February 25-26th, 2021 – University of Southern California, “Visions and Voices”: Eco-Stories: Poetry, Sci-Fi, and Storytelling Workshops with Tjawangwa Dema and Kirk Sides. See event website: “Eco-Stories”

April 18th-20th, 2019 – Pennsylvania State University. Multi-day, collaborative workshop and seminar series for academic and creative writers and researchers on ecological writing and teaching. Co-organized with TJ Dema. See event website: “Anthropocene Storytelling”

Invited Presentations

“‘We Spend Our Days Trying to Read the Lines of Nature’: Landscapes of Exile in the Indian Ocean”, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University, November 2018.

Workshop Facilitator for Arts Management and Literary Activism’s ‘Early Career Academic Writing Workshop.’ “Writing and Revising your Journal Article: From Conference Paper to Peer Review to Publication.” Makerere University, Kampala Uganda, August 2018.

“Hydrofutures: Watery Ecologies in African Speculative Fiction.” Keynote Lecture at Nelson Mandela University, Colloquium on ‘Nautical Metaphors in Film, Language, Literature, Art and Music’, Port Elizabeth, June 2018.

“Seed Bags and Storytelling: Modes of Living after the End in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi.” Sponsored panel of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment: ‘Afronatures and Afrofutures: Speculation, Technology, and Environment in African Literature and Film’, MLA, New York, January 2018.

“African Literature and Filmmakers from Africa”, Panel Host at ‘Africa Writes Festival’, Bristol U.K., September 2017.

“Ecological Pedagogies: Writing and Apocalypse in Afrofuturist Film.” Yale University, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, July 2017.

“Africa and the Anthropocene: A ‘Common Geo-Story?’” University of Western Ontario, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism Colloquium, October 2016.

“Thinking the Anthropocene from Africa: Apocalypse and the End of (Neo-)Liberal Time.” University of Wisconsin, Madison, African Studies Seminar Series, October 2016.

“Reconciliation and Reparations: Reading Race and Righting Injustice in Post-Slavery America and Post-apartheid South Africa.” Weissberg Program in Human Rights, Beloit College, October 2016.

“Thinking the Anthropocene from Africa: Apocalypse and the End of (Neo-)Liberal Time.”  The Climate of Race, Conference between WiSER, The Rock Ethics Institute and the Philosophy Department at Pennsylvania State University, Johannesburg, August 2016.

“Post-apartheid, Post-Slavery and Post-Racial: The Limits of Memory and Rethinking Race Across the Atlantic.” Workshop Leader. Invited by The Literary Cultures of the Global South Consortium. University of Tübingen, Germany, July 2016.

“Both in and out of Africa: The Race of Anthropology and Towards a Transnational History of Apartheid.”  WitsAnthropology Seminar Series, April 2015.

“Ecologies of Relation: Post-apartheid, Post-slavery and Rethinking Race across the Atlantic.” Stellenbosch English Department Seminar Series, April 2015.

Selected Conference Presentations

“Africa and the Anthropocene: Apocalypse and the end of (Neo-) Liberal Time,” African Studies Association, Washington D.C., December 2016.

“Post-apartheid and Post-Slavery: The Limits of Memory and Rethinking Race Across the Atlantic,” African Literature Association, Atlanta, April 2016.

Conference Organizer, “Literature in the Age of the Anthropocene,” Special Two-Day Symposium, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, November 2015.

Panel Organizer, “Alien Bodies: Trashy Futures and Modernity’s Losses,” African Literature Association Conference; paper: “Searching for a Syntax: Landscapes of Slavery, Creaturely Bodies, and the Untimely Futurity of Amos Tutuola’s Writing.” Bayreuth, Germany, June 2015.

“Apartheid’s Transnational Other: Remembering Slavery and Re-thinking Race Across the Atlantic.” MLA Special Session of the Division on African Literatures, “Memory and Circulation in African Literatures,” Vancouver, January 2015.

Panel Organizer, “African Literatures in/and the World,” ACLA, New York, March 2014.

“Holocaust in the Indian Ocean: Jewish Exile in Mauritius and the Exotic Other of Africa.” Arts Council of the African Studies Association Triennial, New York, March 2014.

“The Geographies of Creolization: Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka and Negritude’s Ethnic Bodies.” “Thinking the South Atlantic: Africa, Latin America Exchanges,” MLA Panel, Boston, January 2013.