Dr. Patrice Rankine is scholar in the field of classical reception in the Black diaspora. In 2006, he published Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature, one of the first works of its kind that traced the influence of the Odyssey on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. He is also the author of Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience. Dr. Rankine is currently at work on two book projects: Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning and Slavery and the Book, which includes research he conducted in Brazil. Dr. Rankine recently moved to the University of Chicago, having served previously as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond.
In this lecture, Dr. Rankine will be connecting some of what he found in Ellison's library and archives at the Library of Congress to his essays and novel. The Oresteia is Ellison's most annotated text and this allows Rankine to extend his reading of Ellison's classicism beyond the Ulysses theme.
