Keynotes and Special Events
Seminars and Workshops
Please check back as we continue to add information about seminars, workshops, and social events to the website.
Keynote Speakers
In addition to a number of special panels, receptions, and opportunities for collaboration and exchange, we are pleased to welcome two distinguished keynote speakers to NAVSA 2025: Aftermaths:
Yogita Goyal (UCLA)

Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. She is also the guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014), editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017), and Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (2023), co-editor of a special issue of American Literary History on “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees” (2022), of Representations on “Anticolonialism as Theory” (2023), and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature (2015-2022). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the UC President’s Office, and she is the recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. Past President of A.S.A.P., the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and U.S. literature and is working on “Aesthetics of Refuge,” a monograph on twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, and “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.
Barbara Leckie (Carleton University)

Barbara Leckie is Professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. Most of her work over the last decade focuses on the role of narratives, images, and rhetoric in advancing climate action (see, for example, Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time [Stanford UP, 2022]). She is also the author of several books and articles that consider the role of narrative, images, and rhetoric in advancing social reform including Open Houses: Poverty, the Architectural Idea, and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain (U of Penn P, 2018). And she is the editor of Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain: End of Century Assessments and New Directions (Taylor Francis, 2013); and co-editor, with Janice Schroeder, of a new edition of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (Broadview, 2019). She is the Academic Director of Re:Climate: Carleton Centre for Climate Communication and Engagement and co-founder of the Carleton Climate Commons, an interdisciplinary working group comprised of students, faculty and administrators at Carleton that focuses on the climate crisis through social science and humanities’ perspectives.