About this Event
Black Study(ies) at Columbia University- 2026 Zora Neale Hurston Lecture
Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat: In Conversation
Our Annual Zora Neale Hurston Lecture honors the intellectual fierceness and talents of the singular anthropologist, novelist, and essayist Sister Zora—therefore also honoring our long Black intellectual tradition and its connection to Columbia, and Harlem. A complex figure, Zora Neale Hurston began her career as a Columbia University doctoral student in anthropology at Columbia University. Her inimitable ‘spyglass’ and sensibilities have forever shifted the literary and anthropological landscapes: demonstrated by her novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example; ethnographic and folkloric works, Mules and Men, and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica; her extraordinary autoethnographic work, Dust Tracks on a Road; short story collections, including Spunk; plays, and essays, like “Pet Negro System.”
Jamaica Kincaid is the 2026 Mellon Arts Project Artist-in-Residence in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. The globally acclaimed author of numerous widely taught and translated novels and essays— including Annie John; Lucy; The Autobiography of My Mother; A Small Place, and See Now Then— the Antiguan–American novelist’s profound intellectual and cultural influence extends far beyond literature, into art, cultural studies, and political thought. She is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her most recent essay collection, We're Alone, published in 2025, joins her previous acclaimed works: including Create Dangerously; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak, a National Book Award finalist; Claire of the Sea Light; Brother, I'm Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; as well as seven books for children and young adults; and a travel narrative, After the Dance.
Presented in collaboration by Institute for Research in African-American Studies-Columbia University ; African American & African Diaspora Studies Department -Columbia University ; Africana Studies Barnard College; Institute for the Study of Sexuality Gender-Columbia University; Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race -Columbia University, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society-Columbia University; Columbia University School of the Arts
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture - New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, United States
USD 0.00
