Imani Perry | |
---|---|
Born | Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. | September 5, 1972
Academic background | |
Education | Yale University (BA) Harvard University (JD, PhD) Georgetown University (LLM) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Rutgers University Princeton University Harvard University |
Main interests | Race,law,African American culture,Citizenship,American Politics,Intellectual Traditions,Neoliberalism,Culture and Life,Feminist Thought,Religious Thought |
Imani Perry (born September 5,1972) is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race,law,literature,and African-American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss,Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women,Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University,a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute,and a columnist for The Atlantic . [1] [2] Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America:A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation . [3] In October 2023,she was named a MacArthur Fellow. [4]
Perry was born in Birmingham,Alabama,and moved to Cambridge,Massachusetts,with her social activist parents when she was five years old. [5] Her mother,Theresa Perry,is a professor in Africana Studies and Education at Simmons University and former dean at Wheelock College. Her stepfather,Steve Whitman,was an epidemiologist noted for studying racial disparities in health care. [6] [7] [8] She has described herself as a "cradle Catholic". [9]
Perry attended the public elementary school King Open School in Cambridge,Massachusetts alongside Ilyon Woo. [10] Perry received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Studies and Literature from Yale University in 1994. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School (from which she graduated at the age of 27). She completed a Future Law Professor's Fellowship and received her LLM from Georgetown University Law Center. [11] She credits her childhood exposure to diverse cultures,regions,and religions with creating her desire to study race. [9]
Before joining the Princeton faculty,Perry taught at Rutgers School of Law in Camden for seven years. She received the New Professor of the Year award in her first year and was promoted to full professor at the end of five years,also winning the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. Perry was also a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an adjunct professor at both the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies and Georgetown University Law Center. [12]
In 2009,Perry left Rutgers to join the faculty of Princeton University. She held the title of Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and is affiliated with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies. [13] She has two forthcoming books,one on the history of the black national anthem (from Oxford University Press) and another on gender,neoliberalism,and the digital age (from Duke University Press). [14]
In August 2014,Perry appeared on the public radio and podcast On Being ,discussing race,community,and American consciousness with host Krista Tippett. [15]
In 2021,Perry was awarded a Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. [16]
On November 17,2021,Perry's collected artwork,Welfare Queen,by Amy Sherald sold for $3.9M in a Phillips New York auction. [17]
In 2023,Perry joined the faculty of Harvard University,where she is the Henry A. Morss,Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women,Gender and Sexuality jointly appointed with African and African American Studies. [18] She is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor,Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Perry is the author of six books and has published numerous articles on law,cultural studies,and African-American studies,including a book about Lorraine Hansberry. [19] She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Nobles Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. [20] Her work is largely influenced by the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools,Critical Legal Studies,Critical Race Theory,and African-American literary criticism. [21] Through her scholarship,Perry has made significant contributions to the academic study of race and American hip hop music;she contributed a chapter to 2014's Born to Use Mics:Reading Nas's Illmatic (edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai). Perry's 2022 book,South to America:A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, was a New York Times bestseller, [22] and won the 2022 National Book Award for non-fiction. [23]
On February 6, 2016, Perry was pulled over by the Princeton police, who alleged that she was speeding at 67 mph in a 45 mph zone. [24] Her driver's license was then found to be suspended due to unpaid parking tickets, one of which was two–three years old. Perry was arrested for the outstanding warrant and physically searched. She was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and handcuffed to a bench during the booking process. Perry posted bail and was released. [25] She subsequently drew parallels between police conduct in this incident and behavior cited in the national debate around racially-motivated mistreatment, actual or alleged, of African Americans by the police. [26] Video released by the Princeton Police Department revealed that she might have exaggerated her claims of mistreatment by the officer, though portions of the encounter remain out of view and there is no publicly available video of treatment at the police station. [27] She appeared in municipal court the month after her arrest and paid $428 in traffic fines, the judge having reduced and amended the charges to a lesser offense, "from 22 miles over the speed limit, to nine miles over". [28]
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Phylicia Rashad is an American actress. She is dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University and best known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–1992) which earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations in 1985 and 1986. She also played Ruth Lucas on Cosby (1996–2000).
Raisin is a musical with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Robert Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. It is an adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun; the musical's book was co-written by Hansberry's husband, Robert Nemiroff.
Alice Childress was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades." Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne." Childress became involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors.
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Shauneille Gantt Perry Ryder was an American stage director and playwright. She was one of the first African-American women to direct off-Broadway.
William Leo Hansberry was an American scholar, lecturer and pioneering Afrocentrist. He was the older brother of real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry, uncle of award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry and great-granduncle of actress Taye Hansberry.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. The story tells of a black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances with an insurance payout following the death of the father, and deals with matters of housing discrimination, racism, and assimilation. The New York Drama Critics' Circle named it the best play of 1959, and in recent years publications such as The Independent and Time Out have listed it among the best plays ever written.
Molly Antopol is an American professor and author, writing both fiction and nonfiction. As of 2023, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University. Her primary research interests include the Cold War and the Middle East.
David Attie was a prominent American photographer, widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s. He was one of the last great proteges of legendary photography teacher and art director Alexey Brodovitch. Attie worked in a wide range of styles, illustrating everything from novels to magazine and album covers to subway posters, and taking now-iconic portraits of Truman Capote, Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others. He also created the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly, the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when he illustrated the Capote novella's first appearance in Esquire Magazine. He was best known in his lifetime for his signature photo montages—an approach he called "multiple-image photography": highly inventive, pre-Photoshop collages that he made by combining negatives in the darkroom. His work has received new attention with a pair of posthumous books: the well-reviewed 2015 publication of his Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie," and the 2021 collection of his behind-the-scenes photographs from the very first season of Sesame Street, "The Unseen Photos of Street Gang." He has been the subject of several solo exhibits in recent years, including a two-year retrospective at the Brooklyn Historical Society. One recent critic wrote that even decades later, "his explorations of photomontage remain durably inspired, innovative, and visually dynamic."
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation. She is a co-publisher of Hammer & Hope, an online magazine that began in 2023.
Elizabeth Hinton is an American historian. She is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer, actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson, whose column, with his photograph, ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was: "Where one is enslaved, all are in chains!" The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." In another characterization, "Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists, most of them Communists, to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication, particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid."
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a 2020 book by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Covering the life and works of American writer and activist James Baldwin, and the theme of racial inequality in the United States, Glaude uses these topics to discuss what he views as historical failed opportunities for America to "begin again". He analyzes Baldwin's activism and sexuality and his non-fiction writings, perceiving a shift in his later works. Glaude uses ideas from Baldwin to comment on contemporary racial topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013.