We invite grad students, alumni, and everyone in the MA program learning community to get online this Friday afternoon to hear Dr. Sax discuss his forthcoming book The Man Who Dreamed He Was a Butterfly.

Click here for more information and click here to go directly to the registration form for the event.

Just a reminder here for our graduate community that Dr. Horton will be discussing her current book project, “‘Don’t You Fuck With My Energy’: The Occult, Intersectional Spirituality, and Religious Appropriation in Hip Hop Culture,” today (12/8) on zoom starting at 2pm.

Students and alumni are strongly encouraged to attend. In order to do so please complete the rsvp form linked here. And then at 2pm today click here to open the zoom link. In case you’re new to Zoom, know that you don’t have to actually be on camera, so you can watch the event with your camera and mic off if you prefer. Any questions contact cloots@mercy.edu.

Dr. Dana Horton’s book Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives is now in print. As well, Dr. Horton will be hosting an online-zoom talk regarding her next book project on Thursday December 8, at 2pm, as a part of Mercy College’s Research Salon Series. More information about both the book and the event are as follows:

Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives provides an innovative conceptual framework for describing representations of slavery in twenty-first century American cultural productions. Covering a broad range of narrative forms ranging from novels like The Known World to films like 12 Years a Slave and the music of Missy Elliott, Dr. Dana Renee Horton engages with post-neo-slave narratives, a genre she defines as literary and visual texts that mesh conventions of postmodernity with the neo-slave narrative. Focusing on the characterization of black women in these texts, Dr. Horton argues that they are portrayed as commodities who commodify enslaved people, a fluid and complex characterization that is a foundational aspect of postmodern identity and emphasizes how postmodern identity restructures the conception of slave-owners.

Students and alumni are strongly encouraged to check out the book, and to attend Dr. Horton’s upcoming research discussion based on her next book project, and titled: “‘Don’t You Fuck With My Energy’: The Occult, Intersectional Spirituality, and Religious Appropriation in Hip Hop Culture.” The project uses a Black Feminist theoretical framework to analyze how rappers, such as Princess Nokia, Gangsta Boo, and La Chat, assemble a diverse array of spiritual, religious, and occult symbols to construct their rap personas. Dr. Horton argues that rappers engage in sampling, a common Hip Hop practice, as a way to construct an inclusive identity that challenges patriarchal structures; ironically, by participating in religious appropriation, these artists reinforce the structures that they are attempting to thwart. In addition to lyrical/visual analysis and rap music, Dr. Horton’s presentation will discuss what Hip Hop culture teaches us about our individual and collective spiritual practices.

The zoom event will run from 2:00 – 4:00pm on 12/8. To attend, please complete the rsvp form linked here. And then, to join the zoom meeting, click here to open the zoom link at the appropriate day and time. Any questions contact cloots@mercy.edu.

I am thrilled to share with our graduate community that Dr. Boria Sax has been awarded the Eisenstein Award for Best Essay of the Year by the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS). The Eisenstein prize is awarded annually for the best academic journal article or book chapter published by a member of the NCIS. The essay must have been published in a peer reviewed journal or edited academic book to qualify. Dr. Sax’s essay is “When Adam and Eve Were Monkeys: Anthropomorphism, Zoomorphism and Other Ways of Looking at Animals,” published in The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History, edited by Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (London, 2019). For the record, this is the second time that Dr. Sax’s writing has been so recognized by the NCIS and he is the only person to have been awarded this distinction twice.