Malinda Maynor Lowery is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. She is a historian, scholar and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She has written two books, over 20 book chapters or articles and has published essays for popular audiences in places such as The New York Times.
Lecture, "The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley Peters and White Christianity" with Professor Kim Coles, 10AM:
This one-day symposium will consider representations of race in performance in connection to the work of visual artist Kara Walker, who’s exhibition “Back of Hand” will be on display at the Athenaeum. Taking Walker as a departure point, invited speakers will address themes related to rethinking Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, satire, stereotypes, gender, and identity. The Keynote Speaker is Kirsten Pai Buick, professor of art history, University of New Mexico.
In 2020, Marylyn Tan’s debut volume shocked Singapore’s literary world by winning the country’s premier English-language poetry prize, making its then twenty-seven-year-old author the first woman to ever win the award. Moreover, it is not a polite book. It is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control, and distribute it among those few privileged above the disenfranchised.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer and arts manager. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won a Grace Paley Prize and a Commonwealth Prize, and she has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize three times. Her other awards include fellowships to the Rockefeller Bellagio Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, La Porte Peinte residency, the Hambidge Center, a Tebere Arts Playwright residency, a Miles Morland Scholarship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant.
Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and librettist who has published seven books that bridge thematic concerns such as politics, African-American culture, masks, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. His most recent book, Sho (Wave Books, 2021), was the winner for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.
"‘We had not thus trespassed against your consent’: The Blackamoor Poems by Henry Rainold and Henry King (1630s-1650s)."
Have you ever heard a sound that evokes a memory or an emotion? Listened to something that pulls you back to a particular place and time, a memory, a feeling? Sounds are an integral part of our knowing and being in the world, and yet they are often overlooked or flattened into textual representations in traditional research. Sonic inquiry is an interdisciplinary method of research that takes up skills and traditions from geography, anthropology, ethnography, and the arts.
