Christina Sharpe

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Christina Sharpe is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and in 2024 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

Education
Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child. She received a bachelor's degree in English and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, having studied abroad at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head.

Career and research
Her academic research focuses on Black visual studies, Black queer studies, and mid-nineteenth century to contemporary African-American Literature and Culture.

Employment
Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smiths Colleges from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 until 2018 she held various positions at Tufts University. Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017. She was the first Black woman to be awarded tenure in the English department at Tufts.

At York University since 2018, she is currently a professor in the department of humanities in the Black Canadian Studies certificate program.

Books
She is the author of the books In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. and Ordinary Notes. She authored a critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010). Her forthcoming publications include a monograph: ''Black. Still. Life.''

Monstrous Intimacies (2010)
In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe concerns herself with these sexual-racial economies and the "monstrous intimacies" that percolate within, which she describes as "a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous" (3). Sharpe's articulation is contingent upon an oppositional knowledge that holds in tension freedom and subjection, love and hate; indulging in a "diasporic study" that attempts a "complex articulation" of the sexual economies of slavery to denote how power is constructed at the site of the interpersonal and the intimate. Foregrounding Douglass' primal scene as a scene of subjectivation and objectivation and, later, locating the primality in James Henry Hammond's letters and, later still, Jones' text, Sharpe provides an account of its "psychic and material reach" and its subsequent (re)performances of a double/dubbed birth within sites of monstrous intimacies — the blood-stained gate and the Door.

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
Her second book, In the Wake on Blackness and Being, was published in 2016 by Duke University Press, whose website offers this overview: "In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the 'orthography of the wake.' Activating multiple registers of 'wake'—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of 'the wake,' 'the ship,' 'the hold,' and 'the weather,' Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward."

Awards

 * In the Wake:
 * Finalist, 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction
 * The Guardian, "Best Books of 2016"
 * The Walrus, "Best Books of 2016"
 * Ordinary Notes
 * Winner, 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
 * Finalist, 2023, National Book Award
 * The 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction.

Works (selection)

 * Ordinary Notes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
 * In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
 * Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.
 * Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022.