The Conveners
You can learn more about Professor Pritchard’s work at their website: www.ericdarnellpritchard.com |
Eric Darnell Pritchard (they/them) is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and Brown Chair in English Literacy, Founding Director of the Community Literacies Collaboratory and Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. Eric’s research and teaching focuses on the intersections of race, queerness, sexuality, gender and class with historical and contemporary literacy, literary, and rhetorical practices, as well as fashion, beauty, and popular culture. Their first book, Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (Southern Illinois University Press, November 2016), won multiple book awards, including the inaugural 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on Community Writing. They are also editor of "Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking," a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. In addition to their book and edited volume, their writings have also appeared in numerous scholarly and popular venues including the Harvard Educational Review, The New York Times, Palimpsest, ARTFORUM, and the International Journal of Fashion Studies. Their research and writing has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, among other institutions. Their current projects include a biography of 1980s fashion design superstar Patrick Kelly titled Abundant Black Joy: The Life and Work of Patrick Kelly (forthcoming, Amistad/HarperCollins), an article on Black feminist community literacies and rhetorical activism from 1974 to 1982, and an essay on queer gender and hip hop fashion. As a self-described “community-accountable intellectual,” to borrow a phrase from Black feminist alchemist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Eric’s work and service within the communities they love and are sustained by has also been award honored most recently they received the 2018 Esteem Award for National Service to the LGBTQ Community. You can learn more about Eric's work at their website. |
For more about Dr. Kynard, click here for her website, here for her undergraduate teaching, here for her graduate teaching, and here for her publications. |
Carmen Kynard (she/her) is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Before TCU, she worked in English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as English, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She interrogates race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/ Black cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies. She has taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, and worked as a teacher educator. She has led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning and has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, Literacy and Composition Studies and more. Her award-winning book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies, makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. Her current projects focus on young Black women in college and Black Feminist/Fugitive imaginations in anti-racist pedagogies. Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 1.9 million hits since its 2012 inception. |
Thank You to Our Symposium Assistants from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Texas Christian University, and the University of Arkansas: Josulyn Brooks, Jackie Chicalese, Caylie Cox, Alexa Davis, Aderinsola Gilbert, Kashema Hutchinson, Lea Lester, Jami Padgett, Mason E. Patterson, Hanna Perry, Ashlee Pilcher, Kelcia Righton, and Natalie Shellenberger (click here for full bios)