american-carnage.ca

Dr. Novotny Lawrence is the Director of the Black Film Center & Archive and an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University. A widely published scholar, Dr. Lawrence’s research focuses on Black cinematic/mediated experiences and popular culture, areas that reflect the historic racial discrimination that Blacks have endured and overcome as well as and Blacks’ ongoing struggles for equity and justice. He is the author of Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (Routledge, 2007), the editor of Documenting the Black Experience (McFarland, 2014), the co-editor of Beyond Blaxploitation (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Films (Oxford University Press, 2025). Dr. Lawrence has also published book chapters and journal articles examining gender politics on television, race, gender, and sexual orientation in comedy, and Black masculinity and space/place in horror films to challenge discrimination at the intersections of identity. He is currently co-authoring a book on Oscar and BAFTA-winning screenwriter and University of Kansas professor emeritus, Kevin Willmott. Dr. Lawrence has made several media appearances, including participating in a roundtable discussion about Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) for the Criterion Collection box set, Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, and he is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Popular Culture.

Steven Schryer

University of New Brunswick

Stephen Schryer is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of National Review’s Literary Network: Conservative Circuits (Oxford University Press, 2024), Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty (Stanford University Press, 2018), and Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Post45, Nonsite.org, Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA.