1 pm | Panel Discussion
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College
Davarian L. Baldwin is a leading urbanist, historian, and cultural critic. He currently serves as the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College (CT). Baldwin is the author of several books, most recently In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities and is the text author of “The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle.” He sits on the executive committee of Scholars for Social Justice and the national council of the American Association of University Professors. Baldwin also serves as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and was just named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. His opinions and commentaries have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, PBS and The History Channel to USA Today, Washington Post and TIME.
Chair of African and African-American Studies and Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and of African and African-American Studies
Shanti Parikh’s research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and capitalism, and the politics of state and global interventions (such as public health, humanitarian aid and legal reforms) that emerge to manage, protect and mold populations. Her primary research has been the history and ethnography of sexuality, gender and class in Uganda, East Africa with particular interest in how they have been shaped by the HIV epidemic and aggressive efforts to track, measure and control what has become the most studied modern epidemic. She is currently writing an ethnography on black masculinity along the TransAfrica Highway based on over 20 years of research. She is also involved in an ongoing research project on commercial sex and mobility in HIV hotspots in truck stops, fishing communities and sugar growing regions in Uganda.
Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies
Samuel Shearer’s work focuses on the design, production and destruction of urban space in African cities and how these processes inform popular politics and cultures across the continent. His current book project, tentatively titled “The Kigali After: A New City for the End of the World,” is about the politics of urban design, displacement and the dual crises of capitalism and ecology in one of the fastest urbanizing cities the world: Kigali, Rwanda. His new research project focuses on diasporic communities in three African sanctuary cities. Shearer’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Social Science Research Council and the Divided City Initiative.
Professor of African and African-American Studies
Geoff Ward is director of the WashU & Slavery Project, a university initiative based in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2), in partnership with the consortium of Universities Studying Slavery. His scholarship examines histories and legacies of racialized violence and their reparative implications. This work has been generously supported by institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to numerous research articles and essays, he is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an award-winning book on the contested history and haunting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice.
Assistant Director for Research and Public Engagement, Center for the Humanities
Laura Perry’s work engages with environmental justice, digital publishing and campus-community partnerships. Prior to joining the Center for Humanities, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar with University of Iowa’s Humanities for the Public Good initiative and helped design curriculum for humanities graduate students interested in a range of careers serving the public good. She earned her PhD in English from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the managing editor for Edge Effects magazine at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment. A founding member of the Humanities Podcast Network, Laura is also an experienced audio editor and podcaster.
4 pm | Faculty Presentations & Keynote Lecture
Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Performing Arts Department (affiliate)
Miguel Valerio is a scholar of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. He teaches courses in Afro-colonial culture and contemporary Afro-Latin American literature and culture. His research has focused on black Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil. His research has appeared in various academic journals, including Slavery and Abolition, Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas and The Journal of Festive Studies. He is the author of Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and a co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).
Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Director, Program in Comparative Literature
Lynne Tatlock has maintained an abiding interest in the novel and its origins, the construction and representation of gender, reading communities and reading habits, 19th-century regionalism and nationalism, and the intersection between fiction and other social and cultural discourses. Some of her recent publications include books, edited and co-edited volumes, translations and articles on the 17th-century poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the American translator of E. Marlitt, 19th-century American reading of German women’s writing, Gustav Freytag’s alternative address to national community, Gabriele Reuter as contributor to the New York Times, new approaches to book history and literary history, reception and the gendering of German culture, and cultural transfer.
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College
Davarian L. Baldwin is a leading urbanist, historian, and cultural critic. He currently serves as the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College (CT). Baldwin is the author of several books, most recently In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities and is the text author of “The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle.” He sits on the executive committee of Scholars for Social Justice and the national council of the American Association of University Professors. Baldwin also serves as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and was just named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. His opinions and commentaries have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, PBS and The History Channel to USA Today, Washington Post and TIME.
Event webpage
The hub for all things Faculty Book Celebration 2023
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Virtual Book Display
An online display of new publications by Washington University’s faculty in Arts & Sciences, with more than 75 books published in 2021–22
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