Touch and Voice in Absalom, Absalom!

Hortense J. Spillers is at work on three big projects that include the preparation of her dissertation on the rhetoric of Black sermons for publication; the other projects are the idea of Black culture and the status of women in the revolutionary context of the eighteenth century, encompassing St. Domingue becoming Haiti, the birth of the modern French state, and the inauguration of the United States. She lectures widely at home and abroad. Recently retired from Vanderbilt University, she lives in Nashville.

Jonathan Arac is Andrew Mellon Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh, where he founded and directed the Humanities Center (2008–19). He continues to serve on the Keywords Project and the boundary 2 editorial collective.