ACLS Celebrates James Baldwin at 100

August 2, 2024, marks the 100th birthday of literary icon James Baldwin. ACLS is pleased to join the many celebrations of the artist’s life and work taking place worldwide.

We recently invited ACLS fellows and grantees to share their scholarly works and resources they would recommend highlighting research on and related to Baldwin and his work. 

This new collection of scholarly resources will be added to previously published collections of scholarly writing and resources celebrating Inclusive Excellence. Members of the ACLS community are encouraged to email us at news@acls.org with additional contributions, questions, or comments.

Scholarly Resources by ACLS Fellows

ARTICLES

• “The Amen Corner by James Baldwin” (review)
  Theatre Journal, Volume 73, Number 1, March 2021, pp. 91-93
  Written by Isaiah Matthew Wooden F’22, Assistant Professor, Department Chair, Theater, Swarthmore College
• “Something Glorious to Draw On: James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry Now”
  PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (2021) 43 (2 (128)): 26–35.
  Written by Isaiah Matthew Wooden F’22, Assistant Professor, Department Chair, Theater, Swarthmore College
• “Towards a transnational aesthetics of Blackness: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro“
  Transnational Screens, Volume 15, 2024 – Issue 1
  Written by Julianna Blair Watson G’21, French Instructor, Rowan University

BOOKS & CHAPTERS

• “Goethe Meets Baldwin: Notes towards a Comparative Perspective beyond Misappropriation” – Part of the collection Who Can Speak and Who Is Heard/Hurt? (edited by Mahmoud Arghavan, Nicole Hirschfelder, Luvena Kopp, and Katharina Motyl) (transcript published by Columbia University Press)
  Chapter written by Derek C. Maus G’18, SUNY Distinguished Professor of English, State University of New York at Potsdam
• Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
  Written by Jessica Hurley F’14, Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Cultural Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, George Mason University
• Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press, 2024)
  Written by Wendy Salkin F’21, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy of Law, Stanford University