Black Studies, Gender Studies, and English are delighted that Dr. Juliane Okot Bitek is joining our intellectual communities as Assistant Professor of Black Creative Writing! Professor Okot-Bitek is a poet-scholar whose 100 Days, a collection of poetry on how to remember the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, won the 2017 Glenna Luschie Prize for African Poetry and the 2017 INDIEFAB Book of the Year (Poetry) award. It was also nominated for several other writing prizes. Professor Okot-Bitek’s most recent writings include: "What Choices between Nightmares: Intersecting Local, Global and Intimate Stories of Pain in Peacebuilding," Peacebuilding and the Arts (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2020); "Conversations at the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writers Talk," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (2020) and "Treachery as Colonial Intent: A Poetic Response in Critical African Studies (2021).

Dr. Ronjaunee Chatterjee: My work spans nineteenth-century British and French literature, contemporary literature, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. I published my first book, Feminine Singularity: the Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Literature, last year. It’s a book that strives for new models of selfhood that do not rely on pre-existing ideas of difference and otherness, which I argue continue to be shaped by nineteenth-century notions of liberalism and empire. I just submitted the manuscript for a Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s major novel, Middlemarch. The edition is specially designed for scholars, teachers, and students, and contains lots of secondary material in the form of critical essays, explanatory footnotes, and Eliot’s letters and journals, to help readers coming to the novel for the first time. I am also working on a new project on literature and visual art that centers diagrams and the diagrammatic. I’m interested in what novels take from visual practices of abstraction (like the diagram), and how artists rethink those practices in their own work.