Launched in the fall of 2024, the Africana Distinguished Lecture-Speaker Series creates a dedicated space for the campus to engage with the world’s leading voices in Africana scholarship and literature. Professor Simone A. James Alexander, Director of Africana Studies Program, established the series to foster rigorous dialogue and highlight the global impact of the African diaspora. Renowned Kittitian-British novelist Caryl Phillips was the inaugural guest, setting a high standard for the scholarly and creative excellence the series aims to bring to the Lehigh community.
Derek G. Handley
Fall 2025
Derek G. Handley is an associate professor in the English Department, affiliated faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies department, and affiliated faculty in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before arriving at UWM, Derek taught in the English Department at Lehigh University and was an affiliate of Africana Studies. He was a Chamberlain Project Fellow in English and Black Studies at Amherst College, and a Mellon Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Currently he’s the co-director of the Mapping Racism and Resistance research project, which comprehensively maps racial covenants and uncovers Black resistance to such discrimination.
Caryl Phillips
Spring 2025
Kittitian-British novelist, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips grew up in Leeds and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He began his writing career as a playwright; his plays include Strange Fruit, Where There is Darkness, and The Shelter. A prolific writer, Phillips is the author of 13 novels, 4 non-fiction books, and the editor of two anthologies. His work has been translated in over a dozen languages. Phillips has received numerous awards including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence and an Honorary Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford University. Phillips has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States. He is currently Professor of English at Yale University.