ART OF THE LECTURE Lecture I: “Talking in and out of School” Monday, November 9, 2026, 6:00 PM Although lecture courses are a staple of university teaching, there is oddly little scholarship considering the lecture as a format. This series of lectures is framed neither as a straightforward history nor as a practical how-to guide, but instead as an argument for the unique generic qualities and political stakes of the lecture as a mode that hovers between pedagogy and performance. Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of the journal PMLA. Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). He is the Harlem Renaissance period editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (4th Ed., 2025) and has published scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph […]

ART OF THE LECTURE Lecture II: “A Brief History of the Podium Shuck” Monday, November 16, 2026, 6:00 PM Although lecture courses are a staple of university teaching, there is oddly little scholarship considering the lecture as a format. This series of lectures is framed neither as a straightforward history nor as a practical how-to guide, but instead as an argument for the unique generic qualities and political stakes of the lecture as a mode that hovers between pedagogy and performance. Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of the journal PMLA. Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). He is the Harlem Renaissance period editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (4th Ed., 2025) and has published scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, […]

ART OF THE LECTURE Lecture III: “Accompaniments of the Utterance” Monday, November 23, 2026, 6:00 PM Although lecture courses are a staple of university teaching, there is oddly little scholarship considering the lecture as a format. This series of lectures is framed neither as a straightforward history nor as a practical how-to guide, but instead as an argument for the unique generic qualities and political stakes of the lecture as a mode that hovers between pedagogy and performance. Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of the journal PMLA. Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). He is the Harlem Renaissance period editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (4th Ed., 2025) and has published scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and […]