Keynote Speaker: Kinitra Brooks

Keynote: Divine Conjurer: The Conjure Woman in Sinners, Horror & Beyond

The conjure woman is a figure of power and fear in African American Southern communities who blends elements of West & Central African religious practices, Christian belief systems, and Indigenous plant knowledge into a forceful figure of sociopolitical resistance. This talk examines her most recent iteration in the character of Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) while tracing her 20th-century horror film roots.

Kinitra Brooks is the Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture as seen in her weekly column for The Root, “The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country” and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR’s 1A.  She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She has recently co-edited The Renaissance Reader (Routledge 2025), which is also based on a Beyoncé project. Her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman throughout history and in contemporary popular culture as seen in her forthcoming graphic novel, Red Dirt Witch (Abrams Books 2026). Dr. Brooks recently served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year. Dr. Brooks also served as the Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Brooks’ current book project, Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance, and Revolution explores the unique relationship between Black women’s political subversion and Black women’s spirit work.