What are the political and ethical questions that attend an attempt to write a biography of an artist as singular as the novelist, essayist, and playwright, James Baldwin? Moreover, how might the forms of traditional biography be bent and manipulated in order to accommodate the complexities of an individual who spent his life attempting to chronicle the profound cultural and affective complexities that attended the United States’ lurching movement toward racial integration? James Baldwin is a difficult subject. How can we note and celebrate that difficulty while also producing useful criticism of his life and work?

Robert Reid-Pharr is this year's Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality. During his residence at Harvard in fall 2016, Reid-Pharr will teach two courses: Black Masculinities in Literature, Film, and Visual Culture and WGS's theory foundation course, Theories of Race and Sexuality.

Reid-Pharr is the Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, Reid-Pharr has published fourbooks: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001); Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007); and Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016).

Free and open to the public.
Reception to follow.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.