Organizing Team

Marc Blanc

Marc Blanc is a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on race relations in leftist literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing on radical literary history has appeared or is forthcoming in the magazines Chicago Review, Belt, New Territory, and History News Network, and in the peer-reviewed journal College Literature. In addition to his scholarly interest in working-class cultural history, he has volunteered as a labor activist and organizer in St. Louis.

Simone Sparks

Simone Sparks is a musician and writer from St. Louis. You can read their recent writing in Contemporary Music Review and The Midwest Arts Quarterly. They will soon be a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

Ryan Prewitt

Ryan Prewitt is a Ph.D. Candidate and teacher in the English Department at Saint Louis University. He researches the relationship between art, politics, and the internet. In particular, his dissertation interrogates digital platforms as engines for radical right wing politics as well as points of failure for the contemporary left. He regards activism in the arts both as his object of study as well as his methodology for scholarship. His writing on these topics is available in SubStance and Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram with Bloomsbury Press.

Ousmane Gaye

Ousmane Gaye joins The St. Louis Symposium as Gallery Co-Curator. Having spent the last year as The Griot Museum of Black History’s Community Engagement + Campus Conservation Fellow, he brings a fresh perspective with his knowledge of regional racial history and community curation. Most recently, Ousmane was nominated by the St. Louis Board of Alderman as a member of the Detention Facilities Oversight Board. Ousmane has a personal passion for conversing around socially responsive visual language and will curate artwork that bridges the topics of the Symposium and facilitates a space for communal digestion of the themes that will be presented. In his free time, you can find Ousmane photographing urban landscapes, cooking, reading a good book, singing with the In Unison St. Louis Symphony Chorus, and spending time with his cat, Bean. He holds a B.A. in Architecture and Film Studies from Washington University in St. Louis.