The Harris Seminar & Dialogues

Whiteness as Property: Reflections and Retrospectives

October 19th–21st, 2026 | Amherst College, MA

The Race and Regency Lab announces The Harris Seminar and Dialogues, a series of global scholarly conversations centered on Cheryl I. Harris’s landmark essay Whiteness as Property. Co-convened by Professors Kim Hall (Barnard College), Patricia Matthew (Montclair State University), and Amelia Worsley (Amherst College), the seminar brings together an international collective of community organizers, museum professionals, and scholars of pre-1900 cultural studies. Participants come from North America, the UK, New Zealand, and beyond.

These events follow a year of seminar discussions hosted by Amherst College’s English Department, including a session with Harris featuring a wide-ranging discussion of literature, history, and the current U.S. constitutional crisis.

Our aim is to reflect on and amplify the importance of Whiteness as Property as a foundational text for the study of pre-1900 transatlantic literatures and cultures, while also highlighting the intersections of Indigenous cultures and Critical Race Theory. We seek to connect the essay’s core tenets to the urgent questions of our current political moment and to build a new collective that unsettles the foundations of our disciplines. This group works to discourage incentives to assimilate or “pass” and notions of “trespassing,” and instead cultivate spaces for scholarly, intellectual, and artistic “loitering.”

Presenters include Brandi Adams, Donna Chambers, Bakary Diaby, Angelica Diggs, Tapiwa Gambura, Nikki Hessell, Arthur Little, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Meleisa Ono-George, Kate Singer, and Janett Walker.

Image credit: Vera P. Hall, Harriet Tubman, 2008, Cotton, machine applique and machine quilted, (W) 21.5 x (L) 33 in.