12/3/25

Rhode Island School of Design - Fall 2025 Humanities Forum

"The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life.”

The third event in the 2025–26 Humanities Forum features NaimahPetigny, Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies and a scholar of Black feminist thought, performance studies, and queer theory whose work centers the intersections of haunting, erotics, and Black aliveness.
Petigny's talk, "The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life," contends with historical traces, afterlives, and latent erotics, exploring Black aliveness as it is seeded within contemporary art and performance. She details how haunting emerges as a supple orientation—a structure of relation—toward death, pastness, abjection, and embodied knowledge. Returning to and re-reading Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic, Petigny follows Lorde's assertion that a "fed-up-ness" with suffering must sustain erotic power. The talk seeks after playful, unexpected, ephemeral, and suspended experiments with suffering, abjection, and loss in art and performance—experiments marked by an infidelity to the projects of re-dress and a refusal to anchor Blackness in abjection. Ultimately, it develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology and offers holding/embrace as a matrix and orientation toward pastness, embodiment, and the creative excavation of the erotic from the abject.

Colleagues are cordially invited to join us for the third event of the academic year on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at 20 Washington Place, Auditorium 143 on the first floor.

Please register by Friday, November 28, 2025; walk-ins are welcome, but advance registration helps us estimate attendance. A light lunch will be served—please use the form below to RSVP so we can plan accordingly and note any dietary restrictions.

11/20/25

Moderator and Panelist. “Seditious Acts: Collectivity and Resistance Within and Against the Violences.” American Studies Association. San Juan, Puerto Rico.

How do we write, teach, and build community within an academy shaped by austerity, corporatization, and ongoing colonial violence? This roundtable seeks to gather graduate students, postdocs, independent scholars and early career scholars committed to collective writing and knowledge-making as modes of resistance against the isolating forces of the neoliberal university. As former members of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Graduate Writing Group (CRES) at the University of Minnesota, we reflect on how our practices of communal study, writing, and care have shaped our intellectual and political commitments—then as graduate students and now as early-career scholars to open up conversations about violence, collectivity and resistance. 

Through our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work (within black studies, Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies and American Studies) as scholars, organizers, and educators, we consider the possibilities and tensions of writing within and against institutional structures that seek to individualize labor and extract knowledge. What does it mean to sustain intellectual and political projects that refuse the logics of competition, productivity and erasure? How do we continue to hold space for each other and for forms of writing that disrupt dominant grammars of power? We explore the necessity of writing in and with community as a practice of survival and as a method for reimagining scholarship beyond the academy’s constraints. At a moment when the university feels increasingly inhospitable to liberatory thought, we invite participants into a conversation on collective study, writing as a social practice, and the creation of alternative intellectual spaces. If you are seeking ways to write, think, and organize otherwise, we welcome you to join us.

Mining the landscapes and gravitational centers of our disciplines, this roundtable offers a sensuous, lively, orientation beyond Late-Stage American Empire. We gather to collectively re-remember all the tools, maps, and intimacies we’ve inherited from our scholarly, activist, and artistic lineages. If you are feeling undone and ungrounded at this moment, we invite you to be in conversation with us.


 

11/13/25

“Teaching with Tenderness in Harsh Times.” National Women’s Studies Association. San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Diane Harriford, Vassar College

Becky Thompson, Simmons

Naimah Petigny, RISD

Teaching in the time of Trump has become a major challenge as academic freedom is a relic of the past and white patriarchal practice and ideas seem to be the only safe reality.  Anyone who teaches that women should have control of their bodies, that women of all races and men of color can do the same jobs as white men, that immigrants should be able to live peacefully in this country and that transgender people are not a danger to our society is likely to wonder how long they will be able to be in the classroom without being targeted as anti-American and a danger to students.  At the same time, many students seem stressed about the cost of education, employment after they graduate and confused about the purpose of education. The classroom can become a nervous and spiritually austere space for teachers and students as we confront this new reality. Our panel will present  innovative ways that some of us have countered this patriarchal onslaught and created learning communities that enliven the classroom. We will also discuss strategies for keeping feminist ideas and practices alive in the classroom in these harsh times.


4/11/25

Public Talk: “Haunting Repair.”  Invited speaker for Industrial Design Department Repair Café. April 2025.

6/19/24

80 Acres

Public Talk: “Living Legacies of Black Liberation.” Invited speaker for 2nd Annual Juneteenth Gala.

April 2022

Providence College

Public Talk: “The Hold is also an Embrace: Black life, Performance, and Liberation.” Invited speaker Black Studies Department Spring Colloquium Series.

September 2020

Queens’s University, Belfast

Public Talk: “The Radical Teachings of Audre Lorde’s Berlin Years.” Invited speaker for Centre for Gender in Politics Fall Colloquium Series.

March 2018.

University of Minnesota

Pubic Talk: “Embodied Translations: Decolonizing Methodologies of Knowing and Being.” Invited speaker (with Beaudelaine Pierre and Richa Nagar) for Department of Geography, Spring Colloquium series.

February 2017

University of Minnesota

Public Presentation: “Black Femme Bodies in Motion.” Winton Chair Committee Cornerstone Visitor Lecture Series.