Keynote Speaker
Frank Andre Guridy
Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies & Professor of History, Columbia University
“Practicing American Studies in Ages of Authoritarianism”
How is the resurgence of the Global Right affecting the field of American Studies and the work of scholarship in general? Among the many upheavals unleashed by the rise of the Global Right in recent years, especially in the United States, is a re-evaluation of the United States’ role in the global order. Some have argued that the Trump Age is a radical departure from America’s democratic heritage while others insist that it is entirely in line with the country’s history of racism and settler colonialism.
My talk will take up the question what it means to engage in the scholarly study of the United States today through an eclectic revisiting of 20th century transatlantic intellectual networks that animated scholarly and creative work across the Atlantic World. The talk argues that one way forward should entail a re-examination of the field’s transatlantic linkages. It will revisit the solidarity work that made the U.S. a refuge for intellectuals and artists fleeing fascism during the 1930s. It will also explore the long history of exchanges between Black American, Caribbean, and Black Francophone intellectuals as another form of solidarity work that produced new understandings of the Black experience.
The talk suggests that similar solidarities will be necessary if the scholarly enterprise is going to survive today’s iterations of authoritarianism.
Read full biography
Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements.
His most recent book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice from the 19th century until the present. His previous book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s.
Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize from the American Historical Association.