Meet Our 2024 Global Souths Conference Keynote Speaker!
Jarvis C. McInnis is the Cordelia & William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He is a proud graduate of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he earned a BA in English, and Columbia University in the City of New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature. McInnis 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, visual culture, and the archive. He is currently completing his first monograph, “Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South,” under contract with Columbia University Press and will be published in the “Black Lives in the Diaspora” series. This study aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by interrogating the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and cultures in the early twentieth century. McInnis’s award-winning research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholars-in-Residence Program, among others. His work appears in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, The Global South, American Literature, American Literary History, and Comparative Literature Studies.
Meet Our 2024 Global Souths Conference Guest Speakers!
Joel Rhone’s work centers on African American letters after 1945. Primary research interests of his feature generative overlaps between literary production and the manufacture of racial knowledge in the academic disciplines. Joel is heavily interested in how theories of aesthetic autonomy come under scrutiny and revision in the work of figures such as James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett. It’s among these writers that Joel sees modernist notions of autonomy pushed past the limits of late liberalism or the commodity form. He won the Marshall Scholarship in 2015, and his public-facing work has appeared in The Drift, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Joel earned a BA in English from Howard University, and a PhD from the University of Chicago.
Amy Fleury is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Beautiful Trouble and Sympathetic Magic, both from the Crab Orchard Series of Southern Illinois University Press, and a chapbook, Reliquaries of the Lesser Saints (RopeWalk Press). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Image, Crazyhorse, Los Angeles Review, The Penn Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. She is at work on both a poetry collection and a memoir about her son’s two and a half year life in a pediatric hospital. She has taught at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she was director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing. She currently teaches at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.