Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. She is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of several books including award-winning, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. She has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. Colbert’s essays have appeared in African American Review, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Theatre Topics as well as the The New York Times, Washington Post, Public Books, and American Theatre. She is an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., has served as a Creative Content Producer for The Public Theatre’s audio play, shadow/land, and a curator for the exhibition “Art is Energy”: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.
Her talk, "Locating Black Women's Friendship in the Archive: Life Writing, Cultural Criticism, and Performance Studies," comes as part of Professor Shane Vogel's course, "Black Existentialisms."
Humanities Quadrangle, Room 132 On