Hortense Spillers
Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University, is the 2025-26 Una’s Lecturer.
Spillers is a pathbreaking scholar of African American studies and Black feminist thought, whose work has reframed the discourse on gender, the body, and personhood under transatlantic slavery. By reconfiguring the terms by which critical theorists approach the history of racial oppression, Spillers asserts that the violence of the slave system was not simply economic or physical but also profoundly semiotic, shaping the very grammar used to define humanity and familial relations.
Spillers's most enduring contribution is her paradigm-shifting 1987 essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," which reshaped the field's approach to race, gender, and personhood. Spillers theorizes the catastrophic distinction between the "body" and the "flesh," arguing that the enslaved subject was violently reduced to the flesh — a primary site of cultural and physical violation. Focusing on slavery’s vast array of techniques for dislocating the African-American family, through which patrilineal naming and lineage were perpetually disrupted (Papa’s Maybe), Spillers provides a critical account of the “ungendering” of the captive -— with the African-American woman islanded in “a cultural situation that is father-lacking” and the African-American male pressed to assert “the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within.”
In her subsequent scholarship, Spillers extends these insights into literary and cultural criticism. In her landmark collection Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Spillers analyzes a diverse range of literary works, including those by Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Spillers's influence is pervasive across the humanities, serving as a cornerstone for contemporary Black queer theory, critical race theory, and Afro-pessimism.
Spillers has received numerous awards, including the Modern Language Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. She has held faculty positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University.
