Keynote Speakers

Friday, November 13, 2026, 6:30-8:00 PM

Alex Zamalin (Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science and chair of Africana Studies, Rutgers University—New Brunswick) is the author of numerous books including Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (Columbia University Press, 2019) which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Title by the American Library Association, his timely Antiracism: An Introduction (NYU Press, 2019), and his most recent Counterculture: The Story of America From Bohemia to Hip-Hop (Beacon, 2025).

Saturday, November 14, 2026, 6:30-8:00 PM

Tavia Nyong’o (William Lampson Professor of American Studies; Black Studies; Performance Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Yale University) studies Black queer performance, speculative aesthetics, and affective historiography. He is the author of several volumes including Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018), and Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), which reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore Black speculative thought at the edge of planetary crisis.