{"id":6005,"date":"2026-08-05T11:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T16:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/?page_id=6005"},"modified":"2026-09-15T10:52:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T15:52:58","slug":"keynote-speaker","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/keynote-speaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Keynote Speaker: Kinitra Brooks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kinitra Brooks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Keynote: Divine Conjurer: The Conjure Woman in Sinners, Horror & Beyond
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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\u2019s\u00a0Sinners<\/em>\u00a0(2025) while tracing her 20th-century horror film roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/em>, \u201cThe Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country\u201d and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR\u2019s 1A<\/em>.  She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader <\/em>(Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade<\/em>. She has recently co-edited The Renaissance Reader <\/em>(Routledge 2025), which is also based on a Beyonc\u00e9 project. Her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women\u2019s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror <\/em>(Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax\u2019s Daughters <\/em>(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<\/em> (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\u2019s Studies and African American Religions in the Women\u2019s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Brooks\u2019 current book project, Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance, and Revolution <\/em>explores the unique relationship between Black women\u2019s political subversion and Black women\u2019s spirit work. 
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Keynote: Divine Conjurer: The Conjure Woman in Sinners, Horror & BeyondThe 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 […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":6365,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6005","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/383"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6005"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6395,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6005\/revisions\/6395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/global-citizenship\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}