Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a 2023-24 Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. She is the author of Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory).

Dr. Threadcraft’s article “Intimate Justice, Political Obligation and the Dark Ghetto” (Signs, 2014) was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Okin-Young Award, which recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal in 2014. She was the 2017-2018 Ralph E. and Doris M. Hansmann Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Political Studies at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2009- 2012.

Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

Dr. Threadcraft’s new book, The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy, examines the phenomenon of Black Femicide as well as how Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith and Margaret Prescod have confronted disproportionate premature Black death and made transformative democratic interventions regarding those deaths.

Lecture and discussion, moderated by Dr. Katerina Traut, SNF Paideia Post-Doctoral Fellow.

Presented by The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Penn; Penn Arts & Sciences Africana Studies; SNF Paideia Program, and Penn Political Theory Workshop.