RISD Continuing Education

There's still time to register for spring! Enrollment for RISD Continuing Education’s adult and teen online and in-person courses closes April 16. Take a class in Providence, Barrington, or Westerly—or learn from wherever you are.

Secure your spot now—https://ce.risd.edu/.

Meet Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, faculty for RISD Continuing Education’s Summer Intensive transfer credit course, “History, Haunting, Memory: To Ghost is to Stay.”⁠
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Naimah is a Black feminist scholar, dancer and educator. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at , and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Pétigny’s research and teaching is shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer, racial justice facilitator, and dancer in professional ensembles. Pétigny holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Vassar College and earned her PhD in Feminist Studies in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2021. Pétigny’s work has been published in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal and the Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies.⁠
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In this course, students will engage the fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence or presence of figures from the past; and the representation of traumatic memories in social life. Using a range of texts and other materials, we will examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism.⁠
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Check out Pétigny's recent work "Haunting erotics: theorizing Black erotic aliveness" and a special issue of Agitate! "Seditious Acts: Being in, But Not of, the Neoliberal University."⁠
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This online course runs June 22–July 26. Secure your spot and learn more—link in bio.⁠
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Second slide: Leslie Parker Dance Project, Call to Remember, 2020. Pictured, left to right: mayfield brooks, Amara T. Smith, Vie Boheme, Leslie Parker. Photo: Adriana Foreman. Third slide: Naimah Petígny at the Seditious Acts symposium discussing the commitments of graduate students and faculty of color to disrupt the neoliberal University in April 27, 2017. Last slide: Pétigny and a troupe of dancers prepare to perform Corbeaux (Crows) by Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, 2017.