Black Studies, Gender Studies, and English are delighted that Dr. Juliane Okot Bitek is joining our intellectual communities as Assistant Professor of Black Creative Writing! Professor Okot-Bitek is a poet-scholar whose 100 Days, a collection of poetry on how to remember the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, won the 2017 Glenna Luschie Prize for African Poetry and the 2017 INDIEFAB Book of the Year (Poetry) award. It was also nominated for several other writing prizes. Professor Okot-Bitek’s most recent writings include: "What Choices between Nightmares: Intersecting Local, Global and Intimate Stories of Pain in Peacebuilding," Peacebuilding and the Arts (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2020); "Conversations at the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writers Talk," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (2020) and "Treachery as Colonial Intent: A Poetic Response in Critical African Studies (2021).

Sally Brooke Cameron: "I recently completed a book on Victorian women’s writing and modern professions in the nineteenth century; my study, Critical Alliance (University of Toronto Press, 2020), argues that nineteenth-century literary representations of feminist collaboration played a key role in enabling women to enter the modern workforce. I am now developing a new project on nineteenth-century slum reform and children’s literature, as well as a study of the Victorian vampire and popular horror. At first glance, these might seem like very different topics. Yet all of my projects are interested in questions of economics and the role of literature in the social formation of normative (read: ‘productive’ for Victorians) subjects. I want to know who or what counts as ‘Other’ and how literature shapes our relationship to work and desire. I ask, ‘what kind of stories do we tell ourselves about good boys or girls?’ and ‘who counts as (re)productive members of society?’”

Dr. Cameron’s quote of the day: “I want you to believe...to believe in things that you cannot” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula"