2025 James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture by Margo Crawford

Margo Natalie Crawford is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at
University of Pennsylvania. Crossing boundaries between literature, visual art, and cultural
movements, her scholarship opens up new ways of understanding black radical imaginations and
the black experimental impulse. Committed to institution building, she was the Chair of the
Department of English at University of Pennsylvania, the director of Penn’s Center for Africana
Studies, and serves on the advisory board of The Africa Institute. She is the author of Black Post-
Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First- Century Aesthetics (2017), What is
African American Literature (2021), and Dilution Anxiety (2008). Crawford is the co-editor of
The Flesh of The Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (2025), Global Black
Consciousness (2018), and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006). Her essays appear
in a wide range of books and journals, including Photography and the Black Arts Movement,
American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Cambridge Companion to
Contemporary African American Literature, Modern Drama, American Literature, The Psychic
Hold of Slavery, The Trouble with Post-Blackness, The Modernist Party, Publishing Blackness:
Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Post-
1945, Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in Black Freedom Struggle, Callaloo, Black
Renaissance Noire, and Black Camera.

For the annual James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture, Beinecke Library, in collaboration with the Department of Black Studies at Yale, invites a distinguished scholar in the field of Black Studies to deliver a lecture on a topic of their choosing. A list of past lecturers can be found on Beinecke’s website.