Diaspora and Modernity

The Annual Ato Quayson Lecture in Diaspora and Transnational Studies is an event named for the University Professor and the founding director of the Centre: Professor Ato Quayson. His bold research set the Centre’s agenda for more than a decade, and this named lecture now serves as an opportunity for students and scholars alike to participate in the futures that his intellectual vision made possible by hosting and engaging an international scholar of great distinction.

This year, we have invited Professor Lisa Lowe who is a Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997). She is currently working on a book titled A Colonial History of the Present.