Sharon Holland is renowned for her writings on Blackness and sexuality
Distinguished author and lecturer Sharon P. Holland is set to deliver the second annual Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi. The talk is scheduled for 7 pm Monday, March 21, 2022 in the Bondurant Hall auditorium.
Holland, the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and chair of American studies at the University of North Carolina, is titling her lecture “How to Tell a Story about a Horse.”
The Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies is funded by the same endowment that sponsors the Howry Professorship of English, held by Jay Watson, and was created to honor the generosity of the Howry family and to continue the study of William Faulkner’s works at the university. Each year, the lecture brings a Southern literature expert to speak to English faculty, students and alumni and to spark discussion among the community.
“To lure Sharon Holland to the Faulkner studies podium from her brilliant work on Blackness, sexuality and posthumanism represents a real coup for the English department, the university and this lecture series,” Watson said. “Our audience is in for a real treat: a breathtakingly original thinker at the top of her game, and doubtless with surprises in store.”
Holland is a graduate of Princeton University and earned a doctorate in English and African American studies from the University of Michigan. She is the author of “Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity” (Duke University Press, 2000), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association in 2002.
She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Tiya Miles, of the University of Michigan, titled “Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country” (Duke University Press, 2006). Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, “The Queen is in the Garbage” by Lila Karp, to the attention of The Feminist Press for publication in 2007.
Holland is the author of “The Erotic Life of Racism” (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of critical race, feminist and queer theory. Her next project, “an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life,” an investigation of the human/animal distinction and the place of discourse on blackness within that discussion, is under contract with Duke University Press.
To see Holland’s work on food, writing and all things equestrian, go to her blog at https://theprofessorstable.org/.
By Lydia Lagarde
