At each CAAS conference, a plenary address is delivered in honour of the late Virginia J. Rock, a founding member of the Canadian Association for American Studies and organizer of the first annual meeting in 1965. CAAS is pleased to announce that Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce will deliver the 2021 Virgina J. Rock Plenary Address during this year's virtual meeting on Friday, October 22 from 3:00-4:15 p.m. (EDT).
Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce
"How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Some Radical Utterances in the Idiom of Madness"
La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, cultural and literary critic, black/Black studies devotee, Bronx native, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recipient of the Joe Weixlmann Prize for Best Essay in African American Review, he has written widely on black expressive culture in publications inclu-ding American Quarterly, The Black Scho-lar, GLQ, Social Text, and TDR: The Drama Review. He has work forthcoming in The Mad Studies Reader (Routledge Press) and The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature (Cambridge University Press). His first book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, debuted in June on Duke University Press.