Lecture: Jarvis McInnis

The English Department is pleased to announce a lecture by Jarvis McInnis of Columbia University titled "Aestheticizing Labor, Performing Diaspora: Zora Neale Hurston and the Scene of the Work Camp." Jarvis C. McInnis, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he studies African-American and African Diaspora literature and culture. He is completing his dissertation, “Mapping the Global Black South: Aesthetics, Labor and Diaspora.” He has served as a composition instructor and chief academic officer for the W. E. B. Du Bois Scholars Institute at Princeton University. Currently he is an assistant to the editor for Callaloo and the graduate mentor for Columbia’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. McInnis has been instrumental in several important recent initiatives at Columbia. He co-chaired “Producing Race,” Columbia’s first graduate student conference on African Diaspora literature; co-founded a graduate student workshop on race and ethnicity that was instrumental in creating an assistant dean position for academic diversity; and co-led the initiative to reestablish the African Americanist Colloquium. He is currently co-organizing a conference on religion and African American literature.