Seminole State Speaker Series and Zora Festival present: Dr. Rebecca Wanzo

The Seminole State Speaker Series is once again partnering with the Annual Zora Neale Hurston™ Festival of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA!® Festival), for a presentation.

Dr. Rebecca Wanzo, chair and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies & affiliate professor of American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, will be speaking virtually via Zoom webinar on Wednesday, Jan 26. The event begins at 7 p.m. (link opens at 6:45 p.m.)

During her presentation she will discuss the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have contributed to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the United States.

Dr. Wanzo is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY Press, 2009), which uses African American women as a case study in exploring the kinds of storytelling conventions people must adhere to for their suffering to be legible to various institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020), examines how Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. It was the recipient of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society, and the Best Scholarly/Academic Work from the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

Her research interests include African American literature and culture, critical race theory, fan studies, feminist theory, the history of popular fiction in the United States, cultural studies, theories of affect, and graphic storytelling. She has published in venues such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Signs, Women and Performance, and numerous edited collections. She has also written essays for media outlets such as CNN, the LA Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and the comic book Bitch Planet. 

A Q&A session will follow the presentation.

Seminole State’s Speaker Series is co-sponsored by Addition Financial. All Speaker Series events are free and open to the public. Each session, which will be presented via Zoom webinar, will open at 6:45 p.m. Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis. The views expressed by speakers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Seminole State College of Florida, its Board of Trustees, employees, students, alumni, or partners.

For more information, please visit seminolestate.edu/speaker-series.