Please join us for a talk by Dr. Jonathan Gayles, Professor and Chair of the Department of African Studies at Georgia State University. This event is a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences African American and Africana Studies Program, the Martin Luther King Center, the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, and the UK Art Museum, in association with The Life and Death of Charles Williams exhibition, and the eagerly awaited film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
 
Dr. Gayles is a graduate of Morehouse College (B.A., Psychology), Winthrop University (M.S., School Psychology) and the University of South Florida (Ph.D., applied anthropology). His primary areas of interest include critical Black masculinity studies and critical media studies.
 
In 2012, he produced an independent documentary on African-American comic book superheroes entitled “White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in Comic Books.” The American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association awarded the documentary the 2013 Peter Rollins Best Documentary Film Award. More information on the film can be found at blacksuperherodoc.com. In relation to this work, he is one of four co-founders of the Schomburg Center's Annual Black Comic Book Festival (2012). He also produced “The E-Word: Ebonics, Race and Language Politics" (2015). The film examines the national furor in response to the Oakland Unified School District’s Resolution on Ebonics. The film pursues a more informed understanding of “The E-Word” through the use of archival footage and interviews with former students, teachers, administrators, policy-makers and scholars that were directly involved with the Resolution and the national debate that ensued. More information on this film can be found at ewordfilm.com.