November 5, 2009
Brian Purnell

"A Movement Grows in Brooklyn: Civil Rights and Black Power in Postwar New York"

Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Location: RCHA Conference Room (88 College Ave.)

Brian Purnell is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Fordham University and Director of the Bronx African American Oral History Project. His research centers on America since World War II, with specific focus on New York City and State, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, modern liberalism, the development of the US "urban crisis," and twentieth century racial ideology in the US. Professor Purnell's articles have appeared in Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Souls, and the anthology Groundwork.

November 19, 2009
Natalie Byfield

"Savage Portrayal: How the Media Constructed the Central Park Jogger Story as a Tale of Deviance in Black Male Children"

Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Location: RCHA Conference Room (88 College Ave.)

Natalie Byfield is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at St. Johns University. In her previous career, she worked as a staff reporter for New York City’s Daily News and as a media activist and educator. Professor Byfield is currently completing a history and ethnographic study of the Central Park jogger case, which draws on her experience covering the story for one of the city’s major dailies.

February 2010
CONFERENCE

Historians and the Carceral State: Writing Prisons and Punishment into Modern U.S. History

Time & Location: TBA

Two-day conference exploring historical evolution of policing, punishment and incarceration in U.S. from Reconstruction through the present with special attention to the postwar era.

February 25, 2010
Absoede George

"Penal Reform and the Normalization of the African Child 1930-1940"

Time: 6:10-7:30pm
Location: RCHA Conference Room (88 College Ave.)

Abosede George is an assistant professor of history and Africana Studies at Barnard College. Professor George's doctoral research, entitled "Gender and Juvenile Justice: Girl Hawkers in Lagos, Nigeria (1925-1950)," was supported by the Michelle Clayman Institute for Research on Gender and the Weter Foundation. She has also received an Obie Shultz Fellowship from the Institute for International Studies. Her research and teaching interests include social reform movements in Africa, African cultural and intellectual production, urban history, women's studies, and popular culture. She is currently working on a book-length project about the history of juvenile justice in twentieth-century Lagos, Nigeria.

March 23, 2010
Komozi Woodard

"Black Power Studies, the Paradigm Shift, Not a Cultural Poverty: A Golden Age of Black Liberation and African American Renaissance"

Time: 6:10-7:30pm
Location: 301 Van Dyck Hall (16 Seminary Place)

Komozi Woodard is the Esther Raushenbush Professor of American history at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He has also worked extensively as an activist and journalist. Professor Woodard is author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics and numerous reviews, chapters, and essays in journals, anthologies, and encyclopedia, including The Black Power Movement, Part I: Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black Radicalism, Freedom North, Groundwork and Want to Start a Revolution? : Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. In addition to his remarkable academic corpus of work, he as also served as an advisor to the Algebra Project and PBS documentaries Eyes on the Prize II and America’s War on Poverty.

April 1, 2010
Carolyn Brown

“Cowboys, Letter Writers, and Dancing Women: Identity and Struggles Over Space, Leisure, and Time in a West African City – Enugu, Nigeria 1914-1955”

Time: 6:10-7:30pm
Location: RCHA Conference Room (88 College Ave.)

Carolyn Brown is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Her primary research interests are in West African labor and social history. In 2003 she won the Book of the Year Prize from the International Labor History Association for her monograph, We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950. Professor Brown’s current book project is a social history of the nationalist movement in eastern Nigeria. Tentatively entitled, ‘Cowboys’, Letter Writers and Dancing Women: Identity and Struggles over Space, Leisure and Time in a West African City: Enugu, Nigeria 1914-1955, the project looks at how race, class and gender identities are shaped in the colonial city and how these identities impact upon the 'popular classes' response the nationalist discourse.

April 22, 2010
Ted Wilson

A Look Back In Time / 1965 (The Afro-American Youth Cultural Conference)

Time: 6:10-7:30pm
Location: RCHA Conference Room (88 College Ave.)

Ted Wilson is a distinguished poet, writer and activist. Originally with Pride and Liberator magazines, this former Harlemite recently published a collection of poems entitled Slo’ Dance. A cultural worker since the 1960s Black Liberation and Human Rights movements, his writings have appeared in many different venues, including Chickenbones, Black Renaissance Noir, The Black Nation, Black American Literature Forum, Callaloo, and NOBO: Journal of African American Thought, as well as in book anthologies: Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing.