Michael Lackey
(University of Minnesota)
“Moses Biofictions as Critiques of Nazism: Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Mann”
May 13, 2024, 10:15-11:45am, P5 (Philosophicum)
This lecture presents an interpretation of Thomas Mann’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s criticism of Nazis’ deadly political propaganda by using the Biblical figure of Moses in their biofictions: Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mann “Das Gesetz” (English, 1943; German, 1944).
The comparison of the different analyses of the African American writer and Thomas Mann in the American exile will be based on current research about anti-Nazi biofictions from the 1930s and 1940s.
Prof. Michael Lackey is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is an internationally renowned expert on all forms of life writing, with a special area of concentration on biofictions. He spent a year of graduate studies at the Univ. of Heidelberg and was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Siegen.
Major publications include: Biofiction: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2022; Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2021; African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
You can download the poster for the event here.
