Will You Dance Into the Fire?: The Quotidian Violence of Poisoning Your Enslavers

Name: Will You Dance Into the Fire?: The Quotidian Violence of Poisoning Your Enslavers
Start: 2025-10-07T18:00:00-04:00
Location: Case Western Reserve University, Clark Hall Room 206, Cleveland, OH, United States, Ohio 44106

Schedule

Tue, 07 Oct, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Case Western Reserve University, Clark Hall Room 206, Cleveland, OH, United States, Ohio 44106 | Cleveland, OH

In this talk, Kinitra D. Brooks, the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies at Michigan State University, will explore how enslaved Black women used herbal and spiritual knowledge gleaned from Conjure practices to poison their enslavers in antebellum Southern Louisiana.
Registration requested. Register HERE: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeaj2M_sxTBhAELtZLcvB61z4__0SaLKta-Ff37i9dVMr326w/viewform?usp=dialog
About the speaker:
Kinitra D. Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English. She specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture.
Dr. Brooks has a B.A. in English literature from Xavier University of Louisiana and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from UNC Chapel Hill in 2008. She also holds an M.P.H. in international health and development from Tulane University. Prior to joining MSU, she was the Ricardo K. Romo Endowed Professor in the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she also completed her postdoctoral fellowship.
In addition to peer-reviewed articles in journals including The International Review of African American Art, Obsidian, and the African American Review, Dr. Brooks has three books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror, a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror; Sycorax’s Daughters, an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women; and The Lemonade Reader, a collection of essays on Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She is also the co-editor of the New Suns book series at Ohio State UP. Dr. Brooks spent the 2018-2019 academic year as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.