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My name is Xavier Lee. I'm a scholar of comparative literature, critical theory and the history of ideas. I received my PhD from Yale University in 2022. Prior to my post here at UC Davis, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon Sawyer "Visions of Slavery" Seminar at Emory University. 

I am currently working on my first manuscript, which draws heavily from my dissertation research. Tentatively titled Slavery and Black Historical Imagination, the book sets out to question slavery's foundational relationship to the various different "historical consciousnesses" that can be ascribed to black peoples living in and outside of Africa. Using Anglophone and Francophone literary and historical works from the Afro-Atlantic world, I question black writers struggle against the antiblack elements within the very concept of history — as both "the past" and our means of recollecting it as such.