A speaker series for 2023. The goal of this series is to:
- Listen to Black voices
- Foreground cutting edge scholarship
- Contextualize United States history within the African Diaspora
- Highlight the links between academic research and activism
Carmen Thompson "The Making of American Whiteness: The History of Race in America"
Dr. Carmen P. Thompson is a historian and author of The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth- Century Virginia. She earned her PhD in U.S. History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her Masters of Arts in African American Studies from Columbia University in New York. Dr. Thompson is a highly sought expert on Race and Whiteness in America. Her scholarship was quoted in the December 2022 Oregon State Supreme Court decision, Watkins, Jacob Keith v. Ackley, regarding the disparate racial impact of non-unanimous jury decisions. She wrote the introduction to the forthcoming book, Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage, a photo book that chronicles the yearlong protests in Portland, Oregon after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. And she co-edited and authored articles in the peer reviewed journal, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 2019 special issue on White supremacy in Oregon. She has held visiting scholar appointments at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University in New York and in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University, and has taught a wide range of courses on the Black experience and Whiteness at Portland State University and Portland Community College.
Thursday Feb. 16, 2023 5 p.m. Memorial Union, Horizon Room, 49
Catered reception and book sales following talk. Free, open to all.
Presented by the College of Liberal Arts and the Center for the Humanities. This event is part of Black History Month. Accommodations for disabilities may be made by contacting [email protected].
Past speakers from 2020-2021
Adom Getachew: A 'Common Spectacle of the Race': Garveyism's Visual Politics of Founding
Wednesday, April 28 at 4 p.m. via Zoom
Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory.
In July 1920, just a month before the first annual convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the association’s co-founder, Marcus Garvey, announced, “We are a new people, born out of a new day and new circumstance.” The convention, he argued, was a moment of political founding on the model of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. This talk will examine the UNIA’s conception of political founding, with particular attention to central role of images, theatricality and performance.
Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the History Department Unrestricted Fund at Oregon State University.
Watch the video of this event
Michael Dickinson: The Same Manner as in Africa: West African Cultural Survival in the Early Black Atlantic
Friday, March 12, 2021 at 4 p.m.
Dr. Michael Dickinson is an assistant professor in history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was also the 2019-2020 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research examines enslaved communities in early Anglo-American cities. His book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 is forthcoming with University of Georgia Press.
Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Aberbach History Program Support Fund.
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Danielle Terrazas Williams: Who Dared to Question the Word of a Priest? Free Black Women and Social Capital in 17th Century Mexico
Danielle Terrazas Williams is an Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. Her work focuses on African-descended women in colonial Mexico and she is completing a book project titled Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico, which challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on Mexico’s understudied period from 1580-1730.
Friday, February 26, 2021 at 4 p.m.
Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the History Department Unrestricted Fund at Oregon State University.
Watch the video of this event
Carmen Thompson: American Whiteness and Anti-Blackness: Towards an Understanding of Race in America.
Carmen P. Thompson is an independent scholar and historian of race and the Black experience. Dr. Thompson earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her master’s degree in African American Studies from Columbia University in New York where she was the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Excellence in Writing by the Institute for Research in African American Studies for her M.A. thesis.
She is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, where she co-edited and authored articles in the journal’s regionally acclaimed special issue on White supremacy in Oregon. Currently, Dr. Thompson is a visiting scholar in the Black Studies department at Portland State University where she is working on her book "The Making of American Whiteness," which examines the origins of Whiteness in America. Her research interests include the history of slavery and the slave trade in the New World and Pre-colonial West Africa, early African American history, race and ethnicity in early America and the Great Migration.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 4 p.m.
Sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the History Department Unrestricted Fund at Oregon State University.
Watch the video of this event