Faculty Works-in-Progress: Haylee Harrell

Monday, March 31, 2025

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Please join Prof. Haylee Harrell as they presents from their current work-in-progress, Intimate Ghosts: The Mulatta as Embodied Anxiety in 20th and 21st Century America. The project is a black feminist exploration of the mulatta as an affective and speculative figure that haunts conceptions of multiracialism and black racialization in our historical present. As such, it traces a genealogy of the ghostly mulatta through a critical-creative analysis of the lived experiences and artistic works of four modern Black women: author Nella Larsen, theorist Patricia J. Williams, artist-philosopher Adrian Piper, and contemporary writer Danzy Senna. Through these four historically disparate figures, Prof. Harrell explores how the mulatta—a figure regularly relegated to the nineteenth century—haunts and subsequently disrupts twentieth and twenty-first century claims of racial progress.

For a pre-circulated extract, please contact Prof. Sally Connolly (sconnoll@central.uh.edu). We hope to see you there!