Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University, is the 2025–26 Una’s Lecturer. Spillers is a pathbreaking scholar of African American studies and Black feminist thought whose work has reframed the discourse on gender, the body, and personhood under transatlantic slavery. By reconfiguring the terms by which critical theorists approach the history of racial oppression, Spillers asserts that the violence of the slave system was not simply economic or physical but also profoundly semiotic, shaping the very grammar used to define humanity and familial relations.

Hortense Spillers has received numerous awards, including the Modern Language Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. She has held faculty positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University.