Christina Sharpe Explained

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe
Birth Date:1965[1]
Occupation:Professor

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.[2] Christina Sharpe is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and in 2024 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.[3]

Education

Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child.[4] She received a bachelor's degree in English and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, having studied abroad at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.[5] [6] She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head.

Career and research

Her academic research focuses on Black visual studies, Black queer studies, and mid-nineteenth century to contemporary African-American Literature and Culture.[7]

Employment

Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smiths Colleges from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 until 2018 she held various positions at Tufts University.[8] [9] [10] Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017. She was the first Black woman to be awarded tenure in the English department at Tufts.[11]

At York University since 2018, she is currently a professor in the department of humanities in the Black Canadian Studies certificate program.[12]

Books

She is the author of the books In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,[13] Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects.[14] and Ordinary Notes. She authored a critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010). Her forthcoming publications include a monograph: Black. Still. Life.

Monstrous Intimacies (2010)

In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe concerns herself with these sexual-racial economies and the "monstrous intimacies" that percolate within, which she describes as "a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous" (3). Sharpe's articulation is contingent upon an oppositional knowledge that holds in tension freedom and subjection, love and hate; indulging in a "diasporic study" that attempts a "complex articulation" of the sexual economies of slavery to denote how power is constructed at the site of the interpersonal and the intimate. Foregrounding Douglass' primal scene as a scene of subjectivation and objectivation and, later, locating the primality in James Henry Hammond's letters and, later still, Jones' text, Sharpe provides an account of its "psychic and material reach" and its subsequent (re)performances of a double/dubbed birth within sites of monstrous intimacies — the blood-stained gate and the Door.

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)

Her second book, In the Wake on Blackness and Being, was published in 2016 by Duke University Press, whose website offers this overview:

Awards

Works (selection)

Notes and References

  1. News: Wortham . Jenna . 2023-04-26 . The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought . en-US . The New York Times . 2023-04-26 . 0362-4331.
  2. Web site: Christina Sharpe papers (Ms.2018.015) at Brown University Library. live. April 13, 2021. Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. https://web.archive.org/web/20210413164448/https://www.riamco.org/render?eadid=US-RPB-ms2018.015&view=scope . 2021-04-13 .
  3. Web site: lmacadam . 2024-04-17 . Professor Christina Sharpe named 2024 Guggenheim Fellow . 2024-07-09 . YFile . en-US.
  4. Web site: Messer . Miwa . 2023-04-29 . Poured Over Double Shot: Ava Chin and Christina Sharpe . 2023-11-16 . B&N Reads . en-US.
  5. Web site: Biographical/Historical Note: Christina Sharpe papers (Ms.2018.015) at Brown University Library. live. April 13, 2021. Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. https://web.archive.org/web/20210413170240/https://www.riamco.org/render?eadid=US-RPB-ms2018.015&view=biography . 2021-04-13 .
  6. Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. "The Work of Re-Membering: Reading Gertrude Stein, Gayl Jones, Julie Dash, Cherrie Moraga, and Bessie Head." Order No. 9927415, Cornell University, 1999.
  7. Web site: Christina Sharpe - Faculty of Community Services - Ryerson University. March 28, 2019. www.ryerson.ca.
  8. Web site: Christina Sharpe . The Conversation . 5 June 2018 . July 10, 2020.
  9. Web site: Christina Sharpe CV . July 10, 2020.
  10. Web site: Kansara. Anar. May 21, 2018. Six professors of humanities, social sciences to leave Tufts this year. live. April 13, 2021. The Tufts Daily. en. https://web.archive.org/web/20180719034642/https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2018/05/20/six-professors-humanities-social-sciences-leave-tufts-year/ . 2018-07-19 .
  11. News: Wortham . Jenna . 2023-04-26 . The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought . en-US . The New York Times . 2023-05-07 . 0362-4331.
  12. Web site: Christina Sharpe, leading scholar in Black Diaspora Studies, joins Black Studies program at York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. bcs.huma.laps.yorku.ca. en-US. October 25, 2018.
  13. Book: Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. November 14, 2016. Duke University Press. 978-0-8223-6283-8. Durham. 940520601.
  14. Book: Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Duke University Press. 2010. 978-0-8223-4591-6. Durham, NC. 574955806.
  15. Web site: 2016. In the Wake on Blackness and Being. live. Duke University Press. https://web.archive.org/web/20160711010727/https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake . 2016-07-11 .
  16. News: Thien. Madeleine. November 26, 2016. Best books of 2016 – part one. en-GB. The Guardian. April 13, 2021. 0261-3077. The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke), on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living..
  17. Web site: Martineau. Jarrett. December 15, 2016. The Best Books of 2016. live. April 13, 2021. The Walrus. en-US. Christina Sharpe's searing and brilliant interrogation of Black life In the Wake. https://web.archive.org/web/20161216143243/https://thewalrus.ca/the-best-books-of-2016/ . 2016-12-16 .
  18. Nicole Thompson, "Kai Thomas wins Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for debut novel". Toronto Star, November 21, 2023.
  19. Web site: 2 April 2024 . Christina Sharpe . Windham Campbell Prizes .
  20. News: The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought . The New York Times . 26 April 2023 . Wortham . Jenna .
  21. Web site: Cardwell . Erica N. . 2023-07-04 . Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes . 2023-10-21 . The Brooklyn Rail . en-US.
  22. Web site: Christina Sharpe reflects on the complexities of Black life through a new literary form . CBC.
  23. Web site: Muyumba . Walton . In 'Ordinary Notes,' Christina Sharpe reflects on a Black freedom grounded in beauty and possibility despite white supremacist violence and degradation - The Boston Globe . 2023-10-21 . BostonGlobe.com . en-US.
  24. News: ordinary-notes-christina-sharpe . The New York Times . 19 April 2023 . Szalai . Jennifer .
  25. 2023-02-23 . Everything Comes Back to Christina Sharpe's In The Wake . 2023-10-21 . Harper's BAZAAR . en-US.
  26. Web site: Nomenclature by Dionne Brand . 2024-04-24 . firestorm.coop . en.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christina Sharpe".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.