Annual Ace Lecture ‘To Be Free is Very Sweet’ Will be on Zoom This Month

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies announces the Second Annual Asexuality Studies Lecture featuring Dr. Ianna Hawkins Owen.

His lecture is entitled “To Be Free is Very Sweet”: Blackness, Asexuality, and Abolition and is co-sponsored by the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement and the College of Liberal Arts.

It will take place at 4 p.m. on Oct. 26 through Zoom.

Owen is currently an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University. Previously, Owen was an assistant professor of English at Williams College. Owen earned a PhD in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Owen’s areas of interest include African diaspora theory, asexuality, failure and freedom. Owen’s book manuscript is titled “Ordinary Failure.”

Owen hopes the lecture will encourage participants to think of “freedom” as a keyword with a shifting set of meanings, to make it easier for everyone to “see and imagine the coalitional possibility between two overlapping—but often discretely imagined—sets of politics and concerns.”

“I hope to think collectively with participants about the ways asexuals can draw inspiration from abolitionist interventions and simultaneously how abolitionists can draw inspiration from asexual interventions,” Owen said.

For more information on the Ace Lecture, call 662-915-5916. To register, visit: tinyurl.com/isomacelecture22.