“Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present and Future” 

A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Virtual Summer Institute on the works of Zora Neale Hurston that took place July 11-30, 2021.

Why Hurston?

Despite publishing more than any other Black woman writer during her 30-year career, Zora Neale Hurston’s journey from one of the most neglected figures in American and African American literature to a secure place in the literary canon is significant for understanding the critical turns in 20th-century literary history. Her iconic status emerged after the 1978 reprinting of her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God , a work that has become a permanent fixture in high school and college curricula. A phoenix-like figure whose recovery helped to unleash a new generation of Black women writers, Hurston remains a central figure as the Black Women’s Renaissance approaches its fifth decade.

Most assessments of Hurston focus on her four novels, two collections of folklore, an autobiography, close to 20 short stories, and numerous articles she had published before 1950. However, at least seven short stories, four novels, an ethnography, and ten plays remained unpublished during Hurston’s lifetime and are archived in the Library of Congress. Hurston’s deep commitment to historical and cultural preservation, constant boundary crossing (especially between anthropology and the literary arts), her engagement with and embrace of various publics through the use of new technologies, her appeal to both educated society and “the folk,” and her controversial ideas about language, gender, race, culture, and the South connect directly to today’s conversations in the humanities. The Institute was, as such, an opportunity to present Hurston from a more holistic perspective through a rigorous examination of her continually expanding bibliography.

In light of the ongoing need to reexamine canonical African American writers within the changing contexts of culture, community, and knowledge production, the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW) at the University of Kansas, in cooperation with the Association for the Preservation of the Eatonville (Florida) Community (P.E.C.) held a three-week virtual Institute for 25 Higher Education faculty July 11-30, 2021 through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous formats.

Hurston on the Horizon provided an in-depth multidisciplinary reassessment of the works of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), as well as her impact on contemporary practices and central themes within academic and public discourse. Co-Directors Ayesha Hardison and Maryemma Graham, building upon the successes of HBW’s previous NEH Institutes, created an intellectually rich environment for intensive study and collaborative work among NEH Summer Scholars, Institute faculty and practitioners working in a wide range of humanities disciplines.