Tongues Untied at 35: Black Queerness, Art, and the Sacred (Feb 12 - 13)

Jafari Sinclaire Allen is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and editor-in-chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.

The author of the award-winning There’s a disco ball between us: a theory of Black gay life (2022), and ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba– both published by Duke University Press—and the editor of the GLQ special issue Black/Queer/Diaspora, Dr. Allen has published in numerous journals and anthologies. His scholarship and teaching have opened new lines of inquiry and offered re‐invigorated methods of Black feminist narrative theorizing, and praxis, in Black Studies as well as anthropology and queer studies. Engaged in ethnographic research in Cuba and the Caribbean for more than twenty years, recent research has also taken him to East Africa, Brazil, and Western Europe.

 Professor Allen is currently spearheading the 2025 Black Nations/Queer Nations? 30! convening; and is at work on two monographs.

Rev. Brenton M. Brock is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Howard University, where he focuses on twentieth and twenty-first-century African American literature, Black Gay Aesthetics, and questions around decoloniality, anti-Blackness, and theological discourse in the novel. His dissertation explores how contemporary Black gay authors engage the Black Biblical tradition of African American signifying and Black Gay Aesthetics to narrate modern-day lynching stories of Black gay boys coming of age in the Deep South. These stories, framed as crucifixion narratives, deconstruct and re-signify Christian imperialism in modern American society.

Brenton holds a BA in Theology from Stillman College and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he graduated with honors and earned certificates in Black Church and Theology, as well as Women and Gender Studies. Brenton has also taught as an Adjunct Instructor in African American and African Diaspora Studies in the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Department at American University and as an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Departments at Howard University and Georgetown University.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Brenton is a higher education administrator serving as the Program Specialist for the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Multicultural Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). In this role, he oversees the Center’s educational activities and professional development services, fostering an inclusive collegiate experience for historically marginalized student populations, particularly international, undocumented, LGBTQIA+, and first-generation UDC students.

Outside of academia, Brenton serves as the Youth & Young Adult Pastor at Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, where he leads and mentors the next generation in their faith and personal growth. He is also a proud member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is also faculty in the Yale Prison Education Initiative as well as the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute/Yale National Initiative. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique(University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS).

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Ph.D. is assistant professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and his research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series in early 2025, and he has published essays in the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. Greene-Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion. Dr. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for both the Afro-American Religious History Unit and the Religion and Sexuality Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and he served as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network from 2019-2024. In conversation with his research, he has consulted and collaborated with the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions. While at the ISM, he will be working on his current book project exploring the life of Little Richard through the lens of Black religion and sexuality.

As a PhD Student in African American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University, Jathan Martin’s research sits at the intersection of Black Critical Theory, Religious History and Violence with a topical focus on the Black child in the 20th century. His dissertation interrogates the ways Black children have been political and theological matter in the United States (and beyond) with his focus beginning with Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered Children (1979-81) towards the D.C. Sniper (2002). Martin is the founder of The Black Church Historical Preservation Project which has archived the material and oral histories of over twenty churches in the United States. Martin is a 2017 graduate of Florida A&M University and a 2021 graduate of Yale Divinity School.

Cornelius Moore has a nearly 50 year career as a film distributor, curator/festival programmer and dedicated advocate for Black film from the United States, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.  After 42 years in leadership, he is now Co-Director Emeritus of  California Newsreel, the 56 year old San Francisco-based social issue film distribution and production company   He directed its anti-apartheid project, the Southern Africa Media Center and founded its African film distribution initiative, the Library of African Cinema.  He directed its African American Perspectives collection of which Marlon Riggs’ films are a part.   He was a friend and colleague of Marlon Riggs, appeared in Tongues Untied and advocates for its recognition and continuing impact domestically as well as internationally.  He has participated in retrospective programs of Marlon’s work in Brazil.

Cornelius is a film consultant and curator for,  among others, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the BlackStar Film Festival, the Scribe Video Center and Filmfest DC.

Darnell L. Moore is an author, producer and creative hailing from Camden, New Jersey.  

His widely acclaimed memoir “No Ashes in the Fire” about his coming of age Black and Free in America won the Lambda Literary Award in 2019. His  memoir was celebrated as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books and it was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers’ pick.

In addition to his writing, Darnell has served as a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University. He was also a 2019 Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. And over the course of his two-decade long career, he has worked in the fields of education, non-profit administration, higher education, and media. He was one of the principal organizers within the Movement for Black Lives and co-organized the Black Lives Matter freedom ride to Ferguson with Patrisse Cullors. More recently Darnell served as the Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix. 

His insightful writings have been featured in prominent publications including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy, VICE, The Guardian, The Nation, and EBONY among many others. 

Currently, he’s hard at work on his second book, tentatively titled “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You: Black Men Freeing Ourselves” and he’s finishing the final season of his award-winning podcast, which is titled, Being Seen. In 2024, he started a boutique creative consulting agency, Six Zero Nine Creatives, whose name is an homage to Camden, his hometown.

Jordan Mulkey is a doctoral candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Previously, he was a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Critical Theory at Northwestern University, where he received his M.A. in African American Studies in 2022. In 2018, he was recognized as an “Intellectual of The Year” at Morehouse College, where he received his B.A. in English with honors the following year. His research interests broadly engage German idealism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, aesthetic philosophy, black political theology, and the sexual afterlives of slavery. He is currently at work on his dissertation, “Dead to the Future: Eros and Ecstasy in the Sexual Life of Social Death”, which thinks across racial slavery, sexuation, and post-soul aesthetics to trace philosophical inheritances that disclose love as a counter-revolutionary political prerequisite and fascist cultural axiom within radical black intellectual history. 

jalen parks is a third-year student in the Theology and Religion & Modernity subfields. jalen’s research interests are at the interstices of black religion, critical legal studies, critical theory, and literary studies. Specifically, jalen is studying the de/constitution of personhood through the dynamic confluence of theological and legal doctrine in the United States. jalen is also a first-year law student at Boston University School of Law. 

Hailing from Flint, Michigan, jalen is a 2019 graduate of Yale College and a 2022 graduate of Yale Divinity where he obtained the Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and Master of Divinity, respectively. In addition to academic study, jalen is a student of poetry and film photography where he seeks to cobble together what cannot be captured about black life in the protocols of proper grammar that the Academy necessitates. 

Aishah Shahidah Simmons brings the confluence of cultural work, activism, and a 2500-year-old practice to ground her courage in living this complicated life. A survivor-healer, Black feminist lesbian award-winning writer-filmmaker, Aishah brings her life lens to work reinforced by a 22-year practice of Vipassana Meditation, trauma-informed, Mindfulness Meditation teacher certification, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher qualification. Aishah’s diasporic Black survivor-centered cultural productions –the 2006 groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded internationally acclaimed feature film, NO! The Rape Documentary and the 2020 Lambda Literary-award winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse break silences, offer healing paths for trauma, and provide visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence. 

Since 1995, Aishah has led over 400 workshops and dialogues in the U.S. and in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. She has received numerous awards, and held Artist-in-Residence and/or guest faculty appointments at colleges/universities and organizations including the University of Chicago, Temple University, Scripps College, Spelman College, Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Morgan State University, the Highlander Research and Education Center, the Collegeville Institute, the Tiny Sangha Project, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Learn more about Simmons’s cultural work and contemplative praxis at https://linktr.ee/afrolez

Babette Thomas is an artist, radio producer and doctoral student in the departments of American and African-American Studies. Their practice as a radio producer constantly informs their research interests in Black radio and Black new media, more broadly. 

In their undergraduate thesis, Black Radio’s Intimate Re-membering, Babette analyzes the affective nature of archival Black radio recordings. Utilizing notions of the Black sonic, they examine how Black radio served as a mode of care and extended touch towards Black-American communities, throughout the 20th century. 

Having held positions and affiliations with institutions such as The Whitney Museum, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Center For the Study of Slavery and Justice, The Museum of African American History and Culture, SF MOMA, and NPR, Babette is interested in how digital media, specifically sound media can be used as a tool towards public education and memorialization Black-American history.