An interdisciplinary panel discussion on Horror and Hidden Histories in Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

Join us for a roundtable on how vampires and music reveal interconnected stories of the African American and Irish diasporas. Participants include Mary Burke (University of Connecticut), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins (University of Georgia), Demetrius Murphy (Boston College), and Diane Negra (University College Dublin). 

Mary Burke is a Professor of English at UConn. A scholar of Irish and Irish-American identities and cultures, she is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her first book with Oxford UP was a cultural history of Ireland's indigenous minority, the Traveller community, and in 2022, she collaborated with Tramp Press on a new edition of a cult novel by the neglected Irish Traveller writer Juanita Casey. Burke will contribute a chapter on Irishness in Sinners for a Duke University Press edited collection on the film, being edited by Jonathan Gray.

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is the Assistant Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He holds a doctorate in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and his research focuses on Black speculative fiction and film, with an emphasis on horror and future human studies. He is the author of Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2024) and The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2019).

Demetrius Miles Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. He focuses on flourishing, social infrastructure, and the Black class and status structures in the Americas. He has two ongoing book projects. The first, Affirming Blackness: Brazilian Race-making and Resistance in the Digital Age, examines how Brazilians use social media to challenge anti-Blackness and to highlight their racial experiences. His second book project, A Place to Flourish: Black Social Infrastructure, Wellbeing-Making and Futurity in Los Angeles County, examines how gathering sites are created and maintained and their role in fostering overall well-being. 

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including What A Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in PostFeminism (2008), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006), Extreme Weather and Global Media (2015), and I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service (2026). Her work in media, gender, and cultural studies has been widely influential and recognized with a range of research awards and fellowships.

This event is part of the ongoing collaborative series between BC's Irish Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies programs.