Havis is an Associate Professor in both the Department of Comparative Literature and the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. She is keenly interested in how vernacular practices – especially those conjured within the context of Black ancestral discourses – may be understood as doing deep theoretical/philosophical work. During her UB Humanities Institute fellowship, Havis will be exploring how, despite numerous constraints, those often characterized as powerless have crafted ways to exercise power. She asserts that such ‘practices of freedom under conditions of unfreedom,’ may be chronicled through the creative and improvisational traditions that emerge from meaning structures cultivated by Black communities. Evident in the Spirituals, the Blues, Jazz, these modes of creation warrant being taken seriously as philosophy.