Featured Speakers

Schedule                                 Registration & Travel                                 Featured Speakers                                Co-Sponsors

Opening Keynote: Faye Harrison

Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Faye V. Harrison is a Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology as well as a Faculty Affiliate with the Program on Women & Gender in Global Perspectives and the Center for African Studies. She is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the study of social inequalities, human rights, and intersections of race, gender, class, & (trans)national belonging (or not belonging).  She has also contributed to the history and politics of anthropology and of African American/African Diaspora studies. Some of her recent writings address domestic and international divisions of intellectual labor and performing diverse acts of theory-work on “ex-centric” stages.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Award Winning Novelist

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her latest novel Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction; and being named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.