Meet the Team

Co-Organizers // Co-Conspirators

Shacoya Kidwell

Shacoya Kidwell is a second-year Ph.D. student in Literatures in English, a creative theorist, and a Fulbright alumna researching literature as cultural manifestations at the intersection of Black feminism and environmental thought. She endeavors to study the relationship between adverse atmospheric conditions and oppressive ideologies with specific attention to how Black people inhabit, subvert colonial conceptions of time and space. Her projects, including The Rememory Library, a digital repository of revolutionary materials, examine the entanglements between narrative, the land, communities, flora, and fauna. Her work seeks to remember what has happened here as well as the hidden genealogies and cosmologies that will aid in our collective imagining of just, sustainable futures.

Jehan L. Roberson

Jehan L. Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores Black queer textual practices as sites of liberation, place making, and archival interventions in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She holds an MA from New York University's John W. Draper School of Humanities and Social Thought, and a BA in English Literature with a double minor in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Missouri.

Creative-Theoretical Planning Committee

Taylor Pryor

Laura Caicedo

Amrita Chakraborty

Taylor Pryor's work critically examines how race, time, sexuality, and disability are implicated and rendered in various forms of media. She is particularly interested in representations of identity and the manner in which they inform, and are informed by, socio-political realities, and her current project explores Indigeneity in Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon franchise. She presented one of her papers, "'She a Phoenix': Queer Black Futurities in River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts," at the 2021 Northeastern Modern Language Association conference, and her writing has been published in Prose Studies.

Laura Caicedo is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Literatures in English. Moving between Latinx literature and culture, queer of color critique, and women of color feminisms, their work considers time and space to imagine worlds otherwise. Nurturing a nascent love of poetry and its attendant creative practices, Laura’s work continues to develop alongside a deep engagement with the creative-theoretical.

Amrita Chakraborty is a Bangladeshi-American writer and PhD student in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She currently focuses her research on transnational and Women of Color feminisms, decolonial studies, and queer of color critique. Her scholarly and creative writing has been published by the Latin American Literary Review, Kajal Magazine, Shade Literary Arts, and others. She is a blog correspondent with Half Mystic Journal and her microchapbook 'Cold Alchemy' was published by Ghost City Press in 2020. You can read more of her work at amritachakraborty.com

Karina Beras

Lisa Camp

Karina Beras is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology. Her work focuses on belonging and place-making within the context of statelessness in the Dominican Republic. She hails from the Bronx, NY and is excited to be in community with scholars whose works have helped extend her research into the realm of the creative.

Lisa is a scholar of Old and Middle English literature and culture, and comic book and graphic novel studies. Her previous work has focused on medieval English affective piety, medieval and modern visual culture, and the cruciform male body in medieval literature and superhero comics, and on affective codes of masculinity in Middle English alliterative chivalric literature and the Batman mythos. She is broadly interested in cultural “traces” in temporally distant media, and more specifically interested in what those traces reveal about cultural expectations for embodied and gendered experiences. Lisa’s work in superhero comics has been published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics in Summer 2017, and cited in Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus.