Christina Sharpe’s lecture – CANCELLED

3 Apr 2025 - 04:00 / 3 Apr 2025 - 06:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Northrop Frye lecture that was to be delivered this week, Thursday April 3rd by Professor Christina Sharpe is cancelled and will be rescheduled for next year. We are sorry for any inconvenience.

Bao Nguyen

Graduate Administrator

Centre for Comparative Literature

Tel: 416 813 4041 (voice only)

 

The Centre for Comparative Literature presents
a public lecture by our 2025 Northrop Frye Professor

Christina Sharpe
Department of Humanities, York University

“A Lexicon for these Times”

Thursday April 3rd, 2025, 4-6 PM
Northrop Frye Hall, Room NF003
73 Queen’s Park Cr E. Toronto, Ontario.

This lecture is based on Professor Sharpe’s book, What Could a Vessel Be? which is her ongoing consideration of the vessel—what the word and concept does, what it can or might or might not bear. It is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction; what she is calling an inventory essay and it is guided by several questions: “What is the vessel for mourning this?”, “What is the vessel for surviving this?” “What is the vessel for changing this?” What is the vessel: For refusing? For condemning? For imagining? For living?

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)—named by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Ordinary Notes was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027).