The Department of Cultural Studies invites you to the 8th Kamau Brathwaite Lecture in Cultural Studies entitled "Bridges of Sound: Travelling with Kamau Brathwaite" - An Intergenerational conversation featuring Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus; and Dr. Christian Campbell, Trinidadian-Bahamian poet, essayist, scholar and cultural critic.  
 

Gordon Rohlehr (born 20 February 1942) is a Guyana-born scholar and critic of West Indian literature, who is noted for his study of popular culture in the Caribbean, including oral poetry, calypso and cricket. He pioneered the academic and intellectual study of Calypso, tracing its history over several centuries, writing a landmark work entitled Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1989), and is considered the world's leading authority on its development.  His publications include: Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Tunapuna: College Press, 1981); Cultural Resistance and the Guyana State (Casa de las Américas, 1984); Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain, 1990); My Strangled City and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992); The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad, 1992); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Lexicon Trinidad Ltd, 2004); Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture (Lexicon, 2007); and Ancestories: Readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Ancestors” (Trinidad: Lexicon, 2010) and My Whole Life is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (2015).
 
Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist and scholar. He is the author of the acclaimed poetry collection Running the Dusk (2010), which won the UK’s Aldeburgh Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and the Cave Canem Prize among other awards. Running the Dusk was translated into Spanish by Aida Bahr and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo (2015).  Campbell studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and his work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Small Axe, The Financial Times and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Arvon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers Conference and elsewhere, and delivered the annual Derek Walcott Lecture for the Nobel Laureate Festival in St. Lucia. He has contributed to books on visual artists for major exhibits on both sides of the Atlantic and won the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries for his work on Jean-Michel Basquiat.