2024-2028: Dr. Sarah Cervenak
During the period of the professorship, Dr. Cervenak will focus on the research and writing necessary to develop her next book project, Lines, Light and Blur: Black Women Artists Undoing the Wor(l)d. Dr. Cervenak will invite prominent authors to give readings/presentations of their work. These lectures would be hosted by WGSS under the working title “Sticks and Bricks: Black Women’s Writing Against the Wor(l)d. Dr. Cervenak envisions the conversation as opening up a larger conversation on sexuality, race, freedom and the role writing plays in shaping an experience of that relation.
These events will be opportunities for students and faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies to spend time with writers who believe that on a formal level, writing is an activity that does things in the world. Dr. Cervenak states, “Arguably, there is a tendency for students in politicized fields like ours to diminish their own writerly engagements with the world in favor of other forms of social participation—activism on the street, policy work. My hope is that the speakers’ readings, presentations, and offerings will inspire students to take seriously their own writing as both an expression and as a kind of landscape of what they hope their words will build. At the same time, I hope that students develop/continue an appreciation for Black women’s aesthetic and literary experimentation, and for how form (along with content) can engender new possibilities for Black feminist freedom.”
