Faculty Highlight

In this episode, Prof. Eddie Glaude discusses with Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson her application of research on textiles, music, and photography for her upcoming work Black Bodies White Gold. Professor Kesson, an Art Historian at heart, reveals the history and connections of blacks and cotton and their turbulent history across America and Europe. Not only does she examine the economic equivalence, in which enslaved people and cotton were commodities in the eyes of the law, but she also explores how it physically framed the way a slave looked, and in turn felt. Ultimately with this research, her goal is to examine how this history complicates what it means to be free and black in today’s world.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and Robin M. Boylorn, assistant professor of interpersonal and intercultural communication studies at the University of Alabama, spoke about Sojourner Truth at the Fairfax Campus.

Professional football player and activist Michael Bennett is used to crowds of thousands in stadiums. On March 11, he greeted a slightly smaller, but no less enthusiastic crowd in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton as he settled into a leather armchair.

Civil rights icon and scholar Angela Davis returned to her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, over the weekend. She originally planned the visit to receive the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but the institute withdrew the award last month, soon after the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center sent a letter urging the board to reconsider honoring Davis due to her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting the Israeli government and Israeli institutions. Facing swift and widespread outcry, the institute then reversed its decision and reinstated the award. But Angela Davis has yet to say if she will accept it. More than 3,000 people gathered Saturday evening for an alternative event to honor Davis hosted by the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation. The event featured a conversation between Davis and Princeton professor Imani Perry, who is also from Birmingham.