28th Annual Robert Smalls Lecture

Dr. Jarvis McInnis from Duke University will be our keynote speaker. Book signing and reception to follow lecture. Dr. Jarvis McInnis from Duke University will be giving a lecture titled, "From Tuskegee to the Black World: Charting a New Genealogy of Black Liberatory Agriculture in Slavery’s Aftermath”. Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City of New York. Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture. He recently completed his first book project, titled, “The Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by exploring the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Jarvis’s research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, and The Global South.