Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji
The Toni Morrison Society is pleased to announce its third annual lecture at Oberlin College. This years lecture will be delivered by Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji, associate professor at Duke University and 2018 Fellow at the National Humanities Center on Thursday April 12th at 700pm in Dye Lecture Hall on the Oberlin College. Her lecture is entitled lecture entitled "Pride and Paradise: Toni Morrison and the Terrible Frontiers of Freedom."
Dr. Jaji graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and BMus in Classical Piano from Oberlin College and Conservatory in 1998. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at Duke University with expertise in African and African American literary and cultural studies, with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She previously taught at University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center.
Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology. The book traces how exchanges between African American, Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African artists shaped cultural and political liberation projects. She is now at work on two new projects: Cassava Westernsis a study of how global Black writers and artists reimagine the American frontier myth to serve new, local purposes. The second, Classic Black is a study of poetry set to music by black concert music composers.
Jaji, originally from Zimbabwe, is also a poet. Her collection, Beating the Graves (2017) was published through the African Poetry Book Fund with University of Nebraska Press and Carnaval, (chapbook 2014) appears in New Generation African Poets box set. Her poems have appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, Illuminations, Madison Review, ElevenEleven, etc. and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others.
upcoming
>>April 12, 2018
Toni Morrison Society Lecture
Oberlin College
Pride and Paradise: Toni Morrison and the Terrible Frontiers of Freedom
Prof Tsitsi Jaji, Ph.D.
>>May 25, 2018
American Literature Association Conference
San Francisco, CA
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