Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week (4.9.2020) our guest is James Howard Hill Jr. He is an academic, artist, and the recipient of the 2020 Rubem Alves Award for Theopoetics.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, Hill's scholarship in religious studies also engages explorations of performance, disability, gender, and sexuality. His current research relates to Michael Jackson, exploring the ways his music and life left a wake of controversy and exuberance. Hill thinks profoundly about bodies and embodiment, often reflecting on his own childhood as well as what it means to be a Black father in the United States.
His work increasingly explores how his passion for justice can meet scholarship and his creative hope for what might come next. As an emerging artist, Hill has turned to experiments of photography and mixed-media. He wants to build and work collaboratively, feeling as if many are “are tired of pretending that the old wineskins of higher academe aren't bursting in protest for something new.” He is searching for a way forward that rejects the silos that hold apart art from the academy, that divides scholars from their bodies, and that keeps each of us from one another.
