Monica P. Moore Speaker Series: Darieck Scott on Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

The 2022-2023 Monica Moore Speaker Series Lecture will be given by Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He will be presenting on Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, with Professor of Film and Media Studies, and MTL affiliate faculty, Scott Bukatman, and Fifth year MTL Ph.D. candidate, Lucas Williams responding. Please join us for this talk on November 10, in the Terrace Room (Building 460, 4th Floor) at 4pm. There will be a reception following the lecture. 

Darieck Scott (MTL PhD ’99) is Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in

Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and an M.A. in African American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. His teaching and research interests include: 20th and 21st century African American literature; creative writing; queer theory, and LGBTQ studies; race, gender and sexuality in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books.

Respondents:

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman has been published in abundant journals and anthologies, including October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, and Science Fiction Studies.

Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins used Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics to better understand the ways in which comics engage and engross their readers. In his recent monograph on Black Panther, published in the 21st Century Film Essentials series (University of Texas Press), Bukatman considers how the movie offers a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital cultural questions.

Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century Black performance and visual cultures. His work, which spans embodiment, portraiture, Afrofuturism, racial capitalism, and the aesthetics of the Black radical imagination, focuses on Black Diasporic art in the Americas and broader Atlantic world. Luke is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He most recently held fellowships for the Committee of Black Performing Arts at Stanford and the Jefferson Scholarship at the University of Virginia.

Find more information on Luke’s scholarship, artistic work, and educational organizing at LukeWilliamsPhD.com

The Monica Moore Speaker Series is named after the administrator and soul of the interdisciplinary graduate program of Modern Thought and Literature for forty years. It is the only endowed lecture at Stanford that honors a staff member