Christopher Clarke

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Classics 116
Cohort Year: 2017
Education: B.A.,Yale University, 2013

Born in Brooklyn, but raised on the other side of the mighty Hudson in New Jersey, which locals lovingly refer to as the "arm-pit of America," Chris attended and graduated from Yale University, double majoring in English and Germanic studies. As a first year graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, intellectually, Chris is deeply invested and mesmerized by black studies and attempts to weaponize scholarship to serve the task of black and red abolition… Kafka, and the neurotic, compulsive field that we call Kafka studies... inquiries into understanding the philosophical concept of the Sublime and the ways in which the Sublime is attained in both prose/poetry (especially the poetry from Latin American and Caribbean writers like Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott)…. and finally the ways in which concepts of sublimity/transmissibility can be used by educators to deepen our appreciation of cultural productions, especially in an African-American, urban education context.

Deeply in love with being black, Chris is invested in disrupting existing paradigms, while also learning to appreciate and love traditions worth appreciating and loving. In addition to his work as a graduate student, Chris has been teaching high-school history on the Southside of Chicago for the past 5 years and graduated the first advisory of Johnson College Prep Scholars in 2017.