Grégory Pierrot

Fellow’s Talk: Grégory Pierrot on Ronald L. Fair and Malcolm X

2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. The Fire This Time: Ronald L Fair's Many Thousand Gone, a forgotten Fable. Grégory Pierrot, Associate profess of English, UConn, with a response by Danielle Pieratti. March 12, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

The Fire This Time: Ronald L. Fair’s Many Thousand Gone, a Forgotten Fable

Grégory Pierrot (Associate Professor of English, UConn)

with a response by Danielle Pieratti (English, UConn)

Wednesday March 12, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act and before the advent of the Black Power Movement, the year 1965 was a turning point for African American politics and culture, embodied in the radical turn taken by Malcolm X in the months leading up to his assassination. This talk reads Ronald L. Fair’s 1965 novel Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable as a counterpoint to Malcolm X, in the light of the globalization of Black politics.

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA, 2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books, 2021). He is co-editor with Marlene L. Daut and Marion Rohrleitner of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA, 2021), and co-author with Paul Youngquist of a scholarly edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (Duke 2013). He is also part of a team of researchers led by Dr. Maria Baelieva Solomon (UMD) working on a digital edition of the 19th-century, French-language abolitionist review La Revue des colonies, recipient of a NHPRC grant. He will be spending his fellowship year working on his next project, a French-language monograph tentatively titled “Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power” that will explore how American writers imagined imminent African American revolution through fiction during the Black Power era.

Danielle Pieratti (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. She holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, SUNY at Albany, and Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in poetry. She is the author of two poetry collections: Approximate Body (2023), and Connecticut Book Award winner Fugitives (2016). Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was published by World Poetry Books in 2022. Danielle was a 2023 poetry and translation fellow of the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Publishing NOW: How to Start a Series and How to Write for One

Publishing NOW: How to Start a Series and How to Write for One. With Bhakti Shringarpure and Grégory Pierrot. September 27, 2021, 4:00pm. HLB, 4-209.

Publishing NOW

How to Start a Series and How to Write for One

with Bhakti Shringarpure (English & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and Grégory Pierrot (English)

September 27, 4:00pm, Homer Babbidge Library, 4–209

This event will also be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually.

Bhakti Shringapure is the editor for the new series Decolonize That! from O/R Books, as well as the editor-in-chief for Warscapes magazine. Grégory Pierrot is the author of Decolonize Hipsters, the first book published in the new series. They will talk about what it’s like to start and to write for a new series and offer tips for anyone looking to do the same.

If you require accommodation, including live transcription, to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

The 2021 Sharon Harris Book Award

UCHI is honored to announce the winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award for 2021:

Grégoire Pierrot headshot

Grégory Pierrot

Associate Professor of English, UConn

for his book

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2019)

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture book coverThe Harris Book Award Committee notes, “Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture is a brilliantly focused and highly original exploration of the political aims of the shifting narratives of exceptional black avengers who rise in violence and retribution against their oppressors. This expansive and in-depth study is, as Pierrot points out, ‘a history of an essential trope of Atlantic modernity.’ Examining literary and historical texts from Haiti to the United States, to Britain and France, from the late seventeenth century forward, this is an expansive and groundbreaking work that explores new scholarly territories in racism and resistance.”

Honorable mention:

Ariel Lambe headshot

Ariel Mae Lambe

Assistant Professor of History, UConn

for her book

No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (UNC Press, 2019)

No Barrier Can Contain It book coverNo Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War offers a fascinating, transnational study of Cuban antifascists and activists during the 1920s and 1930s, in Cuba and beyond. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States, this well-researched work frames antifascism as an international movement and in so doing contributes not only to the field of Cuban history but also to the history of the Spanish Civil War.”

We thank the award committee for their service. The Sharon Harris Book Award recognizes scholarly depth and intellectual acuity and highlights the importance of humanities scholarship. The 2021 award was open to UConn tenured, tenure-track, emeritus, or in-residence faculty who published a monograph between January 2018 and December 31, 2020.