Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier teaches Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is the author of Reading on the Edge:Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (SUNY 2000), and has published critical essays on modernism, literary and feminist theory, American and African American literature and literature of the Americas, as well as several op eds on systemic racism and COVID-19. Her essay, “The City Shining on a Hill, or by a Lake: (Re)Thinking Modern Americanness, (Re)Writing the American Lynch Narrative and Ida B. Wells” appeared in the January 2018 issue of Modernism/modernity. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript that interrogates Americanness through the lenses of race, gender, law and utopia, and a memoir entitled Hands: A Touch of Cancer.
Stories from Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier & John Preus
Project Overview
Getting in the Way: Making Sense of COVID-19, Racial Injustice and Humanity in Chicago and New York City: The late Congressman John Lewis cautioned us to understand that “in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine.” But at this point in our American history, what has been called a reckoning on race has sparked a global conversation on inequality, highlighting its significance in health disparities, educational and economic oppression, the school to prison pipeline and police brutality. Central to this reckoning is the question of humanity. With the frustration brought on by the isolation of quarantine and the threat of infection on one hand, and the videotaped reality of racial injustice in the form of police brutality on the other, making sense of our troubled world is a difficult task, but not impossible to achieve. By using the Four C’s of 21st Century Skills Learning (critical thinking, creativity,
collaboration and communication) as a backdrop, participating youth will gain crucial aptitudes for future academic and professional endeavors. Fostering dialogue between youth from two of the different cities hardest hit by these issues will provide much-needed perspective on the difficulties we share as well as their possible solutions. And by taking the time to learn and think more deeply about what makes us human in and through such dialogue, students will participate in creating the strong foundation necessary to create the compassionate world we seek for the future, learning to build together across the divides of disease and health, wealth and poverty, equality and inequality, justice and injustice,
violence and non-violence.
