The Queen's University Visiting Scholar Programme and the Department of Film and Media host Dr. Anjali Vats, Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Assistant Professor by courtesy in the Boston College Law School. 

Dr. Vats will give a public lecture on Thursday March 5th at 12pm at the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts in the Screening Room 222. Reception to follow. 

Her talk is titled "The Color of Creatorship: Race, Intellectual Property, and the Making of Americans" on her forthcoming book (August 2020). Vats’ talk explores the historical relationships between copyright, trademark, and patent law as they are linked to articulations of (white) American citizenship. Through the invocation of familiar racial scripts, creators are marked as capable or incapable of producing new and innovative knowledge. By marking periods of citizen creatorship, race liberal creatorship, and postracial creatorship, the talk shows, through high profile controversies over rap and hip hop, life-saving pharmaceuticals, and traditional knowledge how race and property law continue to be racially exclusionary categories, not colorblind ones.