Hazim Hardeman

Academic Year 2026-2027

Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow

Hazim Hardeman is a Prize Fellow and Presidential Scholar PhD candidate in the American Studies Program. Before Harvard, he earned a M.Phil in History at St John’s College at the University of Oxford (with distinction), where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His work has also been supported by New York University, Harvard’s Mellon Urban Initiatives, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. In addition to being a critical practitioner, Hardeman is a poet, and one of his poems is forthcoming in The Wallace Stevens Journal.

Ghetto Adornments: Grief and Poetics in the Black Underclass

Hazim Hardeman’s fellowship project is “Ghetto Adornments: Grief and Poetics in the Black Underclass.” Reading along, rather than against, the grain of the label ghetto and its cognates (such as trifling, cheap, ostentatious, merely ornamental), this dissertation examines how the sense of aesthetic excrescence, or ornamental excess, that attends the black poor’s funerary practices provides the very medium through which they provoke the question of what (and when) is life grievable. Collating and scrutinizing an archive ranging from tattooed tears to twitch streams, documentary film to (a subgenre of rap) drill music, these practices are closely read in relay with, and against the backdrop of, 20^th and 21^st century African American poetry—including by such figures as Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, and Erica Hunt—to show how attending to the black poor’s poetics of grief can reanimate and (at times redefine) how we understand poetic form, technique and strategy more broadly.