“We are happy to welcome one of our most distinguished and exciting cohort of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” says Gates. “We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year. Queer visual cultures in the African diaspora; migratory routes and artistic practices in the Black Mediterranean; the “monstrous” aesthetics of black women’s work; dialect in the early Anglophone Caribbean; the history of Norfolk Prison Colony, the first “community prison”; postmillennial technologies and the practice of race; black diasporic women’s engagement with digital and social media; cruciform churches in Medieval Ethiopia as architectural palimpsests and products of cross-cultural exchange; the intersections of race, space, and the law in the construction of race and citizenship; and Stuart Hall’s unfinished manuscript The Symbolic World. Meaning and Power are among the important projects which the 2020-2021 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”
In residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for Spring 2021, Johnson will be at work on Dark Codex: History, Blackness, and the Digital.