A special event with Amber Jamilla Musser, Thursday, April 25th, at 1 pm.

25 Apr 2024 - 13:00 / 25 Apr 2024 - 14:30

A special event with Amber Jamilla Musser in the Centre for Comparative Literature next Thursday, April 25th, at 1 pm.

I hope that you are doing well! I am writing because I wanted to invite you to a special event with Amber Jamilla Musser in the Centre for Comparative Literature next Thursday, April 25th, at 1 pm. As you may know, Dr. Musser is a prominent scholar of race, critical theory, queer of color critique, and visual culture. She has published three books: Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke UP, 2024). She is also the past president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, a scholarly organization whose journal may be of interest to some of you. Her writing is rigorous and playful—here, she brings together Whitney Houston and psychoanalysis.

The session with Dr. Musser will be a semi-formal conversation between the two of us, followed by a Q&A. It will focus primarily on her most recent book. If you would like to (it’s not required!), you can read the introduction here prior to her talk. (The book is available for purchase here.) I believe that this session will be of particular interest to those who are working with aesthetic theory, in visual studies, and on topics related to feminism, race, and ethnicity. As you will also see if you read her introduction, Dr. Musser enfolds the personal and the scholarly into her work, especially in this most recent book—she wrote it while undergoing cancer treatment, and she has explicitly drawn on that experience. It may be of interest to some of you in that regard as well.

Hope to see you there, and all the best in the meantime!

Sarah Dowling
Assistant Professor, Centre for Comparative Literature
Victoria College Fellow, University of Toronto
President, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present