Department of English

• Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut Street

See here for registration:

http://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/colson-whitehead

Colson Whitehead
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad

Salamishah Tillet
Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Few novelists have written so inventively or across such a wide narrative range as has Colson Whitehead about what Sadiya Hartman called the “afterlife of slavery.” From his first novel, The Intuitionist, which treated racial struggle and uplift in terms of competing theories of elevator maintenance, to his most recent and widely acclaimed Underground Railroad, in which runaway slaves are smuggled northward on actual subterranean trains, Whitehead has found new ways to animate painful and enduring themes of American culture. Join us as Professor Salamishah Tillet engages with one of our country’s great writers on the afterlives of slavery.

Cosponsored by the Departments of Africana Studies and English and the Center for Africana Studies.