Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2025
Nestled amongst the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, the summer session of the School of Criticism & Theory (SCT) at Cornell University is a truly unique experience. Here, graduate students at all stages, early career faculty, community organizers, artists, and independent scholars from around the world come together to learn with and from each other, led by world-class scholars from a range of fields.
At SCT, I participated in the seminar Black Living, Black Art led by Professor Autumn Womack (English, Princeton University). This seminar formed the central aspect of my experience, with most of my time dedicated to reading, thinking, writing, feeling, and dreaming alongside Professor Womack and my seminar classmates. Perhaps because we were the smallest seminar at SCT, the eight of us had the opportunity to collaboratively analyze a number of thinkers central to the study of Black life, including Zora Neale Hurston, Hortense Spillers, James Baldwin, Fred Moten, Dionne Brand, and Saidiya Hartman along with others. Additionally, as a scholar working at the intersection of English and African American studies, Professor Womack incorporated Toni Morrison’s writings throughout our six weeks to exemplify the power and importance of artistic knowledge production.
Engaging with how Black artistic works speak to the structural conditions and experiences of Blackness has expanded the boundaries of my work and inspired questions that will undoubtedly influence my dissertation and my career more broadly. Professor Womack’s keen insight into my analysis of Hip Hop music as a place of knowledge production offered encouragement and pushed me to hone my conceptual focus and to center the importance of Black life to our understanding of the racializing structures and forces that shape everyday life. Lastly, the opportunity to work and learn with and from a group comprised predominantly of Black women demonstrated to me an unfamiliar kind of classroom ethic. The relations of care, commitment, trust, and support I had the opportunity to be a part of demonstrated what it means to approach life from a Black feminist standpoint and to live a praxis that matches those values. I will carry these memories with me fondly.
Outside of the major seminars, SCT also included two writing/publishing workshops, paper workshops, and presentations from the faculty. While beneficial in their own right, the special part of these aspects of the program was the opportunity to connect with the other SCT participants and develop friendships that I hope will last well into the future. Talking to the other SCT participants, I constantly found myself in awe at the creativity, rigor, and passion bursting from their projects. Working with people from departments across the humanities and social sciences, as well as community organizers, artists, and independent scholars, exposed me to fields of study and theoretical frameworks that I might never have encountered otherwise. I am also deeply grateful for the opportunity to attend SCT alongside my UIUC colleague Umair; it is always reassuring to see a friendly and familiar face.
While I have since left Cornell and the sublime gorges of Ithaca, I cannot help but feel that some piece is stuck on me, or perhaps in me. Since leaving this place I sometimes look up from my work and see Cornell’s Libe Slope, where my summer sweat dripped into Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, or the A.D. White Library, where the hushed shuffle of visitors’ feet and the click of their cameras provided the soundscape for Moten’s “The Case of Blackness,” or the lone bench on a shaded path running alongside Cascadilla Gorge where I sat after our seminar screening of The Nickel Boys. For just a moment, I am back again.
My thanks to the Unit of Criticism and Interpretive Theory for awarding me the Nicholson Fellowship and making this opportunity possible.