The Alchemy Lecture

The Alchemy Lecture is a multi-vocal model that brings together a constellation of three to four thinkers and practitioners from different disciplines and geographies annually to think together and in public on the most pressing issues of our times.

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Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010), as well as Ordinary Notes, forthcoming in 2023.

Dele Adeyemo

Architect, Creative Director, and Urban Theorist, United Kingdom/Nigeria

Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) is an architect, artist, and critical urban theorist. Dele’s creative practice, research and pedagogy interrogate the underlying racial drivers in the production of space. Adeyemo is completing his PhD, titled Last Dark Continent, at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the recipient of the Journal of Architectural Educators Inaugural Fellowship, the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Andrew Mellon Fellowship and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Research Fellowship. Adeyemo’s projects have been presented internationally, including at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, the 13th Sao Paulo Architecture Biennial and the 2nd Edition of the Lagos Biennial. He currently teaches an architecture design studio at the Royal College of Art, London.

Wey Dey Move - experimental art film directed by Dele Adeyemo. (Password: WDM2022)

Natalie Diaz

Poet, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, US/Mojave/Akimel O'otham

Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of the American Book Award, and Diaz's second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020 and won a Pulitzer Prize. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lannan Literary Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She is an alumni of the United States Artists Ford Fellowship and now serves on the board of trustees. She is currently a Mellon Foundation Fellow. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program where she is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi

Writer, Associate Professor in philosophy, Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University, France

Nadia Yala Kisukidi is Associate Professor in philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University. She was vice-president of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014-2016). Member of Les Cahiers d’études africaines (CNRS, Ehess) editorial committee, she was co-curator of the Yango II Biennale, Kinshasa / DRC (July/August 2022).

Nadia Yala Kisukidi is specialized in French and Africana philosophy. She has published Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (CNRS, 2013), Dialogue Transatlantique with the brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro (Anacaona, 2021). Her first novel, La Dissociation (Seuil, 2022) just came out.

Rinaldo Walcott

Writer, and Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, Canada

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute and former Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies. He is also a member of the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies of Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. His teaching and research are in the area of Black diaspora cultural studies and postcolonial studies with an emphasis on questions of sexuality, and gender. He is the author most recently of On Property (Biblioasis, 2021) and The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke University Press, 2021).