Join us as we host Dr. Autumn Womack as part of our 42 Books/42 Years celebration with her talk, “‘The End of Something, and the Beginning’: Fragments, Failure, and the Ethics of Reading the Black Literary Archive”, Thursday, October 30 at 4:30 p.m. in the Bridgwaters Lounge at the Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center, with a light reception to follow.
Autumn Womack is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at Princeton University. Her research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literary culture, with particular attention to the intersections of literature, visual technology, and archival practice. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which received the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. She is also the editor of the Norton Library Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition.
In 2023, Professor Womack led the curatorial team for Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, a major exhibition that drew on never-before-seen materials from the Toni Morrison Papers. Her forthcoming book, The Wanderer (Knopf, 2025), continues this archival work by examining Morrison’s creative process. Her essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Black Camera, Women and Performance, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues.