Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Nicole King, ‘A Harlem Library Life: The beginning of the story’

Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Nicole King

 ‘A Harlem Library Life: The beginning of the story’

One of the world’s premier research institutions, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has a hidden history of its own. In addition to housing the papers of luminaries like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Malcolm X, contained within its walls are the voices of my grandparents, my aunt, my uncle, and my mother. In this talk I will outline the early stages of researching and writing about the library’s caretaker family, my family, and the lives they lived nearly 100 years ago. The 135th St Branch, as it was then known, has occupied a central cultural and community role in Harlem since the 1920s and continues to this day. My family, however, knew the library better than anyone. In this workshop I will share some of what my initial research has revealed and the silences which remain.

Speaker Details:

Nicole King, FEA, PFHEA, is Associate Professor in American literature in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford and Peter Thompson Tutorial Fellow in English at Exeter College. She teaches literatures from the 19th-century to the present day. After growing up in New York City, she earned her BA at Princeton University and her MA and PhD degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. She has particular research interests in modern African American and Caribbean/Caribbean diaspora writing. She is the author of the monograph C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (2001) and is currently completing two books, Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction and Reading Solidarity Rage in Caribbean Women’s Writing (with Dr Ana Nenadović). 

Further Details and Contacts:

This is an in-person event and will not be recorded.

NOTE: this event takes place at the new Schwarzman Centre, not the St Cross building.

Registration is required and will close one week before the event (17:30 on 24 October). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out one week before the event.

Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. 

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to Charles Pidgeon.