Professor Anansi Wilson
Mitchell Hamline Professor T. Anansi will be inducted to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College this fall.
The collegium is part of Morehouse’s College of Ministers and Laity that is named for Dr. King, who graduated from the school in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Scholars are selected at various career stages and across a wide spectrum of influence, having “demonstrated and are evolving toward great achievement in their chosen vocation, a profound commitment to their community and society, the planet and the cosmos and are living their lives according to a high standard of cosmopolitan ethical options.”
Dr. Wilson, who joined Mitchell Hamline in the summer of 2021, is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law. An award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of race, sexuality and law–particularly antiBlackness and the law–Wilson’s work is an extension of Dr. King’s. “I am honored that my work, especially my work on BlaQueer living, dying and striving, has been received in this way,” said Wilson. “I stand on the shoulders of many ancestors, and Dr. King is a light among them.
“I take this honor seriously and will continue my work witnessing, testifying to and combatting the ways in which precedents of antiBlackness–both in and outside of law–continue to order and disorder Black living and dying.”
Dr. Wilson was nominated by Rev. Quincy James Rinehart, an adjunct professor and associate campus minister at Morehouse.
Wilson embodies “what it means to be a cosmopolitan scholar whose writing, teaching, activism, and research are bold, original, ambitious, and accessible,” noted Rinehart. “Their thorough attention to how oppressive and legal systems affect Black and Brown bodies disproportionately; how women’s rights are ignored, their bodies policed; and how Queer and Trans flesh is demonized disrupts normative categories of gender and sexuality, transcends the margins of western scholastic thought while engendering possibilities for human flourishing.
“Professor Wilson’s academic contributions make our queer ancestors smile from the grave.”
The induction ceremony will take place in October on the Morehouse campus.