Meet our MMUF fellows: Christian Gines ’25

We’re thrilled to introduce our latest cohort of Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows–meet Christian Gines ’25!

Tell us about yourself!

I am an upcoming junior in Mather House from Mississippi, conducting a Joint Concentration in History and Literature and African American Studies. I am the captain of the Harvard Debate Council, an intern for the Harvard Law Review, and a writer for The Harvard Crimson Editorial and Arts Board. I also received Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Research Grant, where my project entailed a poetry and visual art project that put a twist on the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report. In the creative project, I included Blackout poetry and Black annotation and redaction to provide an alternate reading of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Report. I enjoy reading, running, exploring Boston, and going to museums and concerts in my spare time.

What’s been a formative intellectual experience for you at Harvard?

A formative intellectual experience for me at Harvard was taking Intro to African American Studies in my First-year Spring. This has been the most formative because this class was when I established one of my most profound and lasting intellectual connections with my Teaching Fellow, who has since become my mentor at Harvard. In the class, we were really challenged on our views of colonialism, Blackness, slavery, gender, and everything else that you could think of. That section really influenced the way I approach reading and writing about the legacies of slavery and anti-Blackness. It was the first time I had to freedom to engage with Sadiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and others in a class setting, and it really situated Black feminist approaches in my writings.

What are you studying in Hist & Lit?

Within Hist & Lit, I chose the Ethnic Studies track because it overlaps the most with my interests and my other concentration of African American Studies. My sophomore essay topic, Junior Tutorial Interests, and plans for my longer Mellon Mays Project and eventual thesis are all intertwined around the fashioning of the Black body. I explore the fashioning and dawning of the Black body following Denise Ferreira da Silva and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s arguments about the matter and materiality of Blackness. My research is centered around the archive titled “Leather from a Human Skin,” which was published in the Philadelphia Mercury in 1888 and documented an account of a person detailing his encounter with a doctor that wore shoes made from the “skin of a negro.” I explore how Blackness, as a fetish object, is what the Human kills, maims, and lynches to own control and dominate the market. Ultimately, I write about how the Black body is an available instrument that fashion utilizes to articulate its metaphysical enterprise: to highlight the distinction between the body and the garment and then sever or blend the two dichotomies.

Do you have any summer plans? What are you reading this summer?

This summer, I will be in New York working on my project above, and I will be mentored by the great Fred Moten, who is a Macarthur Genius Grant recipient and Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics, and critical theory. I will be studying under him and helping him with his research and upcoming articles and book that he is working on. We will be studying Black Aesthetics and the Black Radical Tradition and how literature, music, and art have been used to disrupt anti-Black modes of technologies and imagery, and he will be helping me bridge the gap between Black Studies and Fashion Theory. Some of the books on my reading list include Tumi Mogrosi’s De-Aesthetic, Towards a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe and Lacan Noir by David Marriott.