Her edited books include: Warfare in the American Homeland; The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; States of Confinement; The Black Feminist Reader (co-edited with TD Sharpley-Whiting); and The Angela Y. Davis Reader.
James is now completing a book on the prosecution of 20th-century interracial rape cases, tentatively titled “Memory, Shame & Rage.” She has contributed articles and book chapters to journals and anthologies addressing feminist and critical race theory, democracy, and social justice.
A senior research fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, James is also co-curator of digital repositories for the Warfield Center and the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle, an educational nonprofit organization.
She is the recipient of grants, fellowships or awards from: the Fletcher Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; the Rockefeller Foundation; the Bellagio Fellowship; the Aaron Diamond Foundation/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Ford Foundation; and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award.
This year’s Gender and Sexuality Seminar will pursue this question through a variety of lenses: scholarly, archival, legal, and activist. We will examine how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the criminal legal system, and discuss how they shape the possibilities for—and the risks involved in—intervention and dissent.
Given social media’s vital role in enabling unprecedented forms of political organization, and news media’s often problematic role in perpetuating the biases at hand, we hope the seminar series will be a forum for thinking strategically about cultural engagement in the academy, the classroom, and on local and national levels.
A day-long Symposium on April 1, 2016 will bring all four seminar speakers back for a culminating panel and will feature a keynote speaker.
Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and the Committee on Degrees in Studies
of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.