By Emily Sok, Published February 29, 2024
Contact: ep036@uark.edu
Website: https://www.ericdarnellpritchard.com/
Twitter/X Account: https://twitter.com/EricDarnell
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericdarnellpritchard/
Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard is the endowed Brown Chair in English Literacy, and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas who earned a PhD in English and a MA in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As they have said it themselves, “Today, I am an ancestor-led and fortified, “community-accountable” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs), writer, teacher, and Black queer feminist alchemist.”
Their scholarship has centered on fashion rhetorics, Black queer writing studies, and more. Their pedagogy centers on access, transformation, identity, and respect. As an identity and literacy scholar myself, I was excited to have read in Dr. Pritchard’s pedagogy statement the inextricable link between identity and literacy experiences: “Writing and identity are strongly linked in my classroom, in relationships of conflict, yet agreement; a mirror, a window, each functioning separately and differently for all who write, but each making the other possible.”
And so many of Dr. Pritchard’s publications raise this connection in different ways. Their article in The Funambulist titled “Overalls: On Identity and Aspiration from Patrick Kelly’s Fashion to Hip Hop” describes the “the racial, class, gender, and sexual politics implicit to Black representation” interpretable in Patrick Kelly’s fashion aesthetic in the 1980s, which are linked to and symbolic of the politics, history, and culture of Black southern working classes. Patrick Kelly is a topic examined in Dr. Pritchard’s forthcoming book.
To see more about Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard’s take on fashion rhetorics, Black queer and feminist rhetorics, and community literacies, take a look at some their scholarship:
- “Two Boys on Bicycles Falling in Love” (2022), in The New York Times, available here
- “Black Supernovas: Black Gay Designers as Critical Resource for Contemporary Black Fashion Studies” (2017), in International Journal of Fashion Studies, available here
- Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (2016), by Southern Illinois University Press, available here
- “‘Like Signposts on the Road’: The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors” (2016), in Literacy and Composition Studies, available here
The Virginia Community Writing Collaborative 