Announcing the Autumn 2020 Hayden Distinguished Speakers

In Autumn 2020, the Yale School of Art will welcome four Hayden Distinguished Speakers: Angela Y. Davis, Hortense Spillers, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Initially launched in 2017, this speakership, generously made possible by the Hayden Fund for Art and Ideas, will continue to bring globally recognized leaders in art and the academy to Yale to work with students as teachers, mentors, and critics. Past Hayden Distinguished Fellows include Andrea Fraser, Peter Osborne, Carol Bove, Richard Hawkins, and Hito Steyerl, as well as past Hayden Distinguished Visiting Artist Jessica Stockholder.

The School of Art is eager to welcome Angela Y. Davis as a Hayden Distinguished Speaker for the first time. The internationally renowned scholar, writer, and activist will speak virtually to all first year MFA students in late October as part of the all-school interdisciplinary seminar, Diving Into the Wreck: Rethinking Critical Practices, led by Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean and Professor of Art, Marta Kuzma.

Likewise, Hortense Spillers will be joining the School of Art for the first time as a Hayden Distinguished Speaker. Professor Spillers serves as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in English and her work and research has resulted in such pivotal texts as, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Indiana University Press, 1985), for which she served as co-editor and contributed and afterword; Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, Chapman, and Hall; 1991); and Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003). She will be kicking off the fall semester schedule of Visiting Critics in Critical Practice and speaking to students at the start of September.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have joined the School of Art as Visiting Critics in the past, but will be welcomed as Hayden Distinguished Speakers for the first time in Autumn 2020. Together, in 2013 the pair authored the important text The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions), a series of essays made available for free on the web through Minor Compositions’ open access policy. The essays draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. As part of their engagement with the School, Harney and Moten will speak to students in November.

ANGELA Y. DAVIS

Activist and scholar in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, popular music culture and social consciousness, philosophy of punishment

Professor Angela Davis is an internationally-known scholar and an icon in the movement to combat oppression in the U.S. and abroad. For more than a half century, her work as a writer, teacher, and activist has emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality.

Davis is the author of nine books and numerous articles. She is the author of the pathbreaking and widely-read Women, Race & Class (1983), as well as Women, Culture & Politics (1990) and Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1999). She is a leader in the prisoner abolition movement, reflected in works like If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), and Abolition Democracy (2005). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015) demonstrates why she is a world-renowned lecturer on liberation politics. In addition to her extensive literary output, Davis has been featured in a many films, such as Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975 (2011); Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2013); and *13th (2016).

Angela Davis’ life in the movement is inseparable from her career in academia, making her a frequent target for institutional efforts seeking to repress the freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. When she was appointed to teach in the philosophy department at UCLA in 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan and University of California leadership terminated her contract the following year. Because of her support of George Jackson and the “Soledad Brothers,” Angela Davis found herself on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list in 1970. Her capture and arrest led to her eighteen-month incarceration and trial, during which she became the most famous political prisoner of her generation.

In 1972, she was acquitted of all charges. After her acquittal, Davis re-established her career in academia at an array of preeminent institutions, including The Claremont Colleges. She joined the Black Studies Center, the predecessor to the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies in 1975. Once again, her hiring incited resistance from administrators, trustees, and donors, resulting in the termination of her appointment after two semesters.

Controversy may have followed Professor Davis wherever she taught, but she managed to craft a career of distinction for more than forty years. She held appointments at numerous prestigious institutions both in the US and abroad. Today, she is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she taught for seventeen years.

Bio courtesy of Pomona College, where Professor Davis will speak in March 2021 as the Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecturer.

HORTENSE SPILLERS

American literary critic, and Black Feminist scholar

Hortense J. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory, and Cornell Universities. She has also served as a guest professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University during academic year 2002-03 and for two consecutive years during tri-semester terms at the John F. Kennedy Center for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, 2000 and 2001. A recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them, grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she has been a fellow at both the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, and the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto. While at Haverford, she was chair of the English Department for two years before moving to Cornell where she joined the Norton projects by serving as one of the period editors of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. At Vanderbilt, where she joined the English faculty there in AY 2006-07, she founded The A-Line Journal, an independent online magazine devoted to examination of national and world events through a theoretical lens.

Her collection of scholarly essays, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003. With Marjorie Pryse, she co-edited Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, published by Indiana University Press; Spillers also edited for the English Institute series a collection of essays entitled Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, published by Routledge. Spillers serves on a number of editorial boards, among them, the Editorial Collective of boundary 2, and is a former member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association. Some of her more recent essays have appeared in The New Centennial Review, das argument, and boundary 2. She co-founded with Tamura Lomax The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to feminist issues and critique. Currently, she is at work on two new projects, the idea of black culture and black women and early state formations. She teaches courses in American and African-American literature, Faulkner, and feminist theory. She travels extensively, lectures widely both at home and abroad, most recently delivering the 2010 Sidney Warhaft Distinguished Memorial lecture at the University of Manitoba, and will give the DuBois Lectures at Harvard in the fall of 2014. She lives in Nashville.

Bio courtesy of Vanderbilt University.

STEFANO HARNEY

Theorist

Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management. After a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University (1985) and an MA in American Studies from New York University (1988) Harney obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge (1993).

Before joining Singapore Management University in 2012, Harney was Professor of Strategy (2010 – 2012) and Reader in Strategy (2006 – 2011) at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, as well as Reader in Governance and Strategy/Program Leader for South East Asia (2005-6) and Lecturer (2003-2005) at the Management Centre of the University of Leicester.

In addition to numerous articles and essays, Harney has authored three monographs: A-Z of Business: a convivial guide (Duke University Press, 2019); State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke University Press, 2002), which not only “develops an innovative theory of the labor of government workers in North America” but also offers a “cultural study of the state”; and Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (Zed Books and the University of the West Indies Press, 1996), which “examines the changes and influences on the sense of nationalism and peoplehood caused by migration and the ethnicization of migrant communities in the metropoles.”

Harney has also cooperated with Fred Moten in co-authoring numerous book chapters and journal articles, as well as a number of publications. Together, they wrote the books All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia; in preparation), Black Study (with Robin Kelly et al; Living Commons Press, in preparation) and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2013).

Bio courtesy of The European Graduate School / EGS.

FRED MOTEN

Poet, critic, and theorist

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019).

Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.

Bio courtesy of New York University.