Bio
Hazim Hardeman is a Presidential Scholar and Graduate Prize Fellow PhD candidate in the American Studies Program. His research examines the cultural products and practices that emerge from the routine encounter with premature death among young people in inner city black communities. His dissertation tentatively titled "Angels to Feel Every time the Wind Blows: Death, Ritual, and Regeneration in Black Life" looks at how experience with loss becomes the staging ground for identity formation and expression, leading to creative and critical self-fashionings that allow young people to reflect, reflect on, and potentially refract the conditions of their lives. This project, with its focus on the so called “urban underclass,” aims to inspire a reevaluation of the role of death in black studies, the political economy of postproduction, and critical theory more broadly from the vantage of an often-neglected community.
Before Harvard, Hazim completed an A.A. in Communication Studies at the Community College of Philadelphia; a B.A. in Rhetoric and Public Advocacy at Temple University, and a M.Phil in History at St Johns College at the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been supported by The Rhodes Trust, NYU and Harvard’s Mellon Urban Initiative, and The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities.