Unexceptional Blackness and Blind Matter

Kanner Forum Featuring Matthew Vernon

Join UCLA English for “Unexceptional Blackness and Blind Matter,” a talk by Matthew Vernon, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Davis. Professor Vernon will discuss Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation of Everyman as it relates to invisibilization of race. Professor Vernon will focus on the problems and possibilities this play raises in relation to politics and race through the Middle Ages.

The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by UCLA English Professor Matthew Fisher. This event is co-sponsored by UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature and CMRS Center for Early Global Studies.

Matthew Vernon is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, The Black Middle Ages, explores the understudied relationship between medievalism and Blackness in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. He has also written articles on a set of his interests around issues of race and genre. This has led to articles on the post-truth phenomenon in nineteenth-century novels, Black speculative fiction, and comic books about displacement and vulnerability. He is currently working on an article on the adaptation of the medieval play, Everyman.

Kaplan Hall 193 and on Zoom

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Kanner Forum: Matthew Vernon