Faculty

Red Summer: Percival Everett’s American Landscapes

Over a period of two years, starting in 2019 when he began work on his novel The Trees, Percival Everett made a series of paintings to commemorate the century anniversary of the Red Summer, a summer that saw so many lynchings in the United States. In the conversation and slide presentation, Everett and Crystal Feimster discuss the ways he uses oil paints, watercolors, and photographs of his own paintings to create portraits of an American landscape that is ever-present, but often conveniently ignored.

Matthew Jacobson (Yale University), “Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era”

Join us for a conversation with Matthew Jacobson (co-director of the Yale Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale) and Robin D. G. Kelley (the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles) on Professor Jacobson’s new book, “Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History” (University of California Press, 2023).

Inaugural Lecture in American Studies: Audra Simpson, “Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow”

Audra Simpson, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University

Author of the award-winning book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Audra Simpson is a political anthropologist whose work is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics.

The Teaching Archive

A roundtable discussion with Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida)—authors of The Teaching Archive—along with Caleb Smith (Yale).
Moderated by Alice Kaplan (Director of the Whitney Humanities Center).
Whitney Humanities Center
4:30 pm EST

Webinar: Defying Illegality: Organizing in and around Migrant Detention

Amidst ongoing debates about policing and mass incarceration, migrant detention centers have been focal points for mobilizations against the U.S. carceral regime. Through coordinated protest, testimonial acts, and hunger strikes, incarcerated migrants have drawn attention to systemic abuses in prisons, while defending their rights to belonging, family unification, and transnational mobility. Their actions revealed the ways that ICE used the COVID-19 pandemic to further repress prisoners.

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