University of Chicago’s Professor Kaneesha Parsard to Give Annual Shannon-Clark Lecture at W&L Parsard’s lecture on Sept. 26, titled “The Friending Plot: Sexual & Economic Freedoms in Early 20th Century Caribbean Fiction,” is free and open to the public.

By Emily Innes
September 17, 2024

Kaneesha Parsard, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, will give the annual Shannon-Clark Lecture in English at Washington and Lee University on Sept. 26 at 7 p.m. in Northen Auditorium in the Leyburn Library. Her talk is titled “The Friending Plot: Sexual & Economic Freedoms in Early 20th Century Caribbean Fiction.”

Before the lecture, attendees can get a “sneak peek” of the exhibit celebrating the 75th anniversary of W&L’s Shenandoah literary magazine and enjoy light refreshments in the area outside of Northen Auditorium, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

Parsard’s research concerns gender and sexuality amid the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. More broadly, her research considers the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, and questions of Black feminisms, transnational feminisms and materialist feminisms. Her first book project, “An Illicit Wage: Economies of Sex and the Family after West Indian Emancipation,” is an aesthetic history of hoarding, sexual labor and hustling as practices of freedom in the 19th- and 20th-century British West Indies.

“Kaneesha’s research on artistic depictions of informal economies in the Caribbean has already opened up new avenues of research in Caribbean studies, and her book ‘An Illicit Wage,’ is an exciting new addition to the field,” said Lubabah Chowdhury, assistant professor of English at W&L. “We are beyond thrilled to bring Kaneesha to campus and to provide students and faculty an opportunity to engage with Caribbean arts and letters.”

As part of her visit to W&L, Parsard will also lead a retreat with students pursuing English majors and creative writing minors on Sept. 27.

Parsard earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and her doctorate from Yale University. Her scholarship has appeared in various journals, including “Small Axe,” “South Atlantic Quarterly,” “Representations,” “boundary 2” and “Verge: Studies in Global Asias.”

The Shannon-Clark Lectures in English, established by a gift from a Washington and Lee alumnus who wishes to remain anonymous, honor the memories of Edgar Finley Shannon, chairman of Washington and Lee’s Department of English from 1914 until he died in 1938, and Harriet Mabel Fishburn Clark, a grandmother of the donor and a woman vitally interested in liberal arts education.