The Art, Craft, and Ethics of Creative Nonfiction

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A conversation about creative nonfiction and the craft of storytelling with Surekha Davies, author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, February 2025), and Tamara Walker, author of Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023), moderated by Society of Fellows scholar Eli Cumings.

About the speakers

(Claire Tow Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Barnard College) is an historian with wide-ranging interests. She researches and teaches courses focused on the history of slavery, gender, and racial formation in Latin America, their legacies in the modern era, and the theme of global Black mobility. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center at the Schomburg Institute for Research in Black Culture. She is currently working on various new projects, including a book on racial storytelling in Latin American visual culture, and another on the mysterious pirate known as Black Caesar.

is an SOF/Heyman Fellow and a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Her work explores the representation and interpretation of human difference in early modernity, with a particular focus on the emergence of racial thought in Reformation England. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2023 with a thesis on human monstrosity, after which she was employed as a research associate on the UK-based project ‘Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720’. Eli's current book project explores how popular theology, particularly the doctrine of providence, shaped thinking about bodily and human difference in early modern England. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

is a British author, speaker, and historian, with a BA and an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of London. She is the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. Her writing has been supported by such institutions as the American Historical Association, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. She has written about biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities