standard disclaimer: this blog does not support nor profit from google ads. If you see a Google ad, please don’t click it.

Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity is sponsoring a conference on black women in academe that promises to discuss, mentor, and reach toward positive collaboration and advancement of black faculty and graduate students. The conference is FREE and open to the public and will feature the following speakers:

• Evelyn Hammond
• Beverly Guy-Sheftall
• Melissa Harris-Lacewell
• Cathy Cohen
• Elizabeth Higgenbotham
• Hortense Spillers

I have had the privilege of working with almost all of these women at one time or another in my career and if you have not, you should definitely be at this conference. Their work inspires and their presence is powerful.

Here is the description for the event from their website:

The idea for this conference grew from several sources. It has been over fourteen years since the historic conference “Black Women in the Academe: Defending Our Name.” Those of us who are involved in the 2009 conference believe it is time to re-visit some of the issues raised by that successful conference, particularly in light of statistics that show a decline in the number of black faculty on campuses around the country. Additionally, conversations surrounding the issues raised in the edited volume, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (UNC Press 2008), have spawned interest in the concerns of black women in the academe.  As the contributors to that volume express in so many different ways, black women bring unique experiences to academia, experiences that at once chronicle the advances made in the area of academic diversity and demonstrate the terrain yet to be traveled. The contributors to Telling Histories, and the concerned faculty at Rutgers, believe that a conference that reviews and assesses the scholarship on black women, that explores ways to successfully navigate the academic terrain, and that devises strategies to insure a diverse faculty and curriculum is well worth holding. If Rutgers’ new President’s Council on Institutional Diversity and Equity is any indication, discussions like these are occurring at many academic institutions, and a conference on those who stand at the nexus of racial, ethnic and gender policy is well worth holding.

You can access the entire schedule here.

You can buy Deborah Gray White’s book Telling Histories (recommended in our historical reading list meme) here.