Black Trees: Witness, Injury, and Black Arboreal Futures with Maurice Wallace
Fri, Dec 11, 2026
5:30 PM–7:00 PM
Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all.
Join us for the inaugural State of the Discipline lecture series featuring Maurice Wallace (Professor of English, Rutgers University-New Brunswick) for his lecture “Black Trees: Witness, Injury, and Black Arboreal Futures.”
Professor Wallace’s lecture explores a neglected leitmotif in the Black environmental imagination, namely the dark woods as a racial figuration and single trees as Black doubles. With a view toward outlining a history of human/tree identification in Black literature and visual culture in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—Solomon Northup and Angelina Grimke to Alice Walker, Alison Saar, and Percival Everette—this presentation of black and green life together reveals a shared political sympathy between captive Blacks and what Matthew Battls calls “feral trees.” Against a popular misapprehension of the relationship between Black and trees as historically inimical (an effect of the ritual threat, dread, and discharge of lynching violence in the US), this lecture takes from a range of Black writers and visual artists a vision of Black/tree relations that is not only past in the precolonial sense but alive with speculative possibility for liberated Black futures.
About the Speaker
Maurice Wallace is professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (2002) which earned the MLA William Scarborough Prize and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (2022) both published by Duke Univ. Press. He is also co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Duke 2012). Wallace teaches nineteenth- and twenty-century African American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, and Black cultural studies. At Rutgers, he co-directed the 2023-2024 Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA) Faculty Seminar, “Sound Studies and Voice” (with Andrew Parker in Comparative Literature) and with Nathan Jérémie-Brink of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, been co-convener of the CCA Gospel Materialities Working Group. Professor Wallace is currently at work on two monographs: a study of the material world of Frederick Douglass titled Objects and Uplift: Frederick Douglass, New Materialism, and the Black Hermeneutics of Things, and a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US titled Black Trees: Reflections of Race and Tree Life in the Americas.
(Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
About the State of the Discipline Series
The State of the Discipline lecture series is a collaboration between the English Ph.D. Program and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center which explores and responds to economic, political, technological, ideological, and other pressures that the humanities disciplines face today. The series will bring together nationally and internationally recognized scholars advancing rigorous humanities research in innovative and generative ways. Read more about the series here.
This event is co-hosted and organized by English Ph.D. Program and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center
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