The Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) presents a Guest Speaker Series, “Sylvia Wynter: Being Human.”

 This series is in collaboration with Prof. Michele Elam’s graduate course on Sylvia Wynter, AFRICAAM 249C, and honors the political, creative, and intellectual legacy of Sylvia Wynter, a former Stanford faculty member in the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese, and former Director of the Program in African and Afro-American Studies.

Key Goals:

1. Showcasing one of Stanford’s most powerful intellectual scholars and cultural critics of the 21st century.

2. Leveraging renewed academic interest in Wynter’s scholarship and writings.

3. Providing a platform for junior scholars and Ph.D students to present their work and network with senior scholars in their field.

Speaker Line-up:

May 6 : "Sylvia Wynter and Black Study: Experiments in Transscalarity" – Umniya Najaer, Ph.D.

Umniya Najaer is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar of Sudanese origin. She is serving as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder and will start as an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and African and African American Studies in August 2026. Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality, and death making.  Umniya is at work on a scholarly monograph about the Jamaican critical theorist Sylvia Wynter. Umniya’s recent publications include "For My Sisters Who Entered The Nile With Open Eyes," “Disarm Humanity: Meditations from the Third Decade of the Third Millenium,” “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First-Generation African Poets series in 2018.

May 20: "Outside our Present Conception of the Human" – Dr. Che Gossett, Ph.D in conversation with Seyi Osundeko (English Ph.D. Student)

Che Gossett is a non-binary writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study. Their forthcoming work includes a special issue of Social Text, co-edited with Tavia Nyong’o on Sylvia Wynter and the question of technology, and a special issue of Trans Studies Quarterly, co edited with Sora Han, on blackness, transness and psychoanalysis. They also host a podcast, titled FQT podcast, where they are in dialogue with artists, scholars, poets, physicists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They hope you will check it out! 

May 27: " Reflections on Sylvia Wynter and the Question of Technology.” – Professor Tavia Nyong’o in conversation with Kay Barrett (English Ph.D. Student & Knight-Hennessey scholar.

Tavia Nyong’o studies Black queer performance, speculative aesthetics, and affective historiography. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory  (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018). He co-edited José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) with Joshua Chambers-Letson. His current work spans the performative turn in museum practice, the re-examination of “race” and racism in performance and aesthetics, racial and sexual dissidence in art, and the self-conscious end of unaugmented thought. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Nyong’o is the author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), which reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore Black speculative thought at the edge of planetary crisis. He continues work on two additional books: a cultural history of race, sex, and gender in postwar Downtown New York, and a public-facing study of the racial reckoning in contemporary art and performance.

(All talks-1.30-2.3pm; Q&A, refreshments-2.30-3.00pm)

RSVP HERE.

Co-sponsors:
The series is co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Department of English, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), and Iberian and Latin American Cultures (ILAC). Additional support is provided by the Department of Anthropology, the Humanities Center, and the Center for the Study of the Novel.