Events

Lindsey Andrews is one of the founding owners of Arcana, a tarot-inspired bar and art space in Durham, NC. She has a Ph.D. in English and Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, and a B.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction & Poetry) from the University of Southern California. She has taught classes at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and North Carolina State University, as well as through Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer programs. Her writing and publications focus on the relationships among art, science, and medicine. Select publications include Black Feminism’s Minor Empiricism: Hurston, Combahee, and the Experience of Evidence (Catalyst 2015), and From Inside a Black Box: Entangling Albert Einstein, Ralph Ellison, and George Jackson (Lute & Drum 2016). She grew up in rural Georgia, and after spending a decade in Los Angeles, has made her home in Durham, NC. She has two dogs, Clark Gable and Veronica Lake, who surprisingly look a lot like their namesakes.

In 2005, the Africana Research Center and the Department of African and African American Studies initiated the Nelson Mandela Lecture Series to recognize and introduce the Penn State community to the scholarship of an African human rights activist and scholar.  The lecture is named after Nelson Mandela because he is, by far, the most widely recognized human rights activist; he not only changed the sociopolitical structure of South Africa, but he also challenged the world to have a conscience in addressing human rights.

Dr. King's teaching interests are largely about the Black Freedom Struggle, Urban and Social History, Gender and Women's History, carceral studies, and racial capitalism. His research interests lie mainly in Black politics outside the South, political economy and capitalism, social movements, and community politics.

Dr. Thomas is an Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. On June 22, 2015, the College-Hill Seventh-Day Adventist Church (CHSDAC), a predominately African American church in Knoxville, Tennessee, was burned. Bales of hay were left in front of the church and set ablaze. The church building sustained minor damages. A side door and surrounding wing of the church sustained fire and smoke damage. The church van was also ignited, its chassis and tires significantly damaged by fire making it inoperable. The local police classified the burning as an act of vandalism. No suspect was ever apprehended. Dr. Thomas' talk will focus on her current ethnographic inquiry into this local arson and its aftermath, and is guided by a matrifocal methodology—an autoethnographic ethics that explores and informs her relationship to the research as a daughter, black feminist anthropologist, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, and the gendered and institutional dynamics of her own relationship to place and black socio-religious life. She also investigates the complexities of studying black subjectivity, anti-black racism, and religious violence in Appalachia—a region that is not associated with a large African American population, the plantation complex, or the post-industrial city. In addition to troubling racial, regional, and spatial narratives of exceptionalism that might obviate the quotidian character of anti-black religious violence in Knoxville, Dr. Thomas applies a matrifocal methodology to explore the gendered implications of black church arson (the burned blackmotherchurch) and its attempt to circumscribe black church therapeutic potentialities that are highly mediated by black women’s homosociality.

Dr. Simms-Burton is a retired university professor of American Literature and African American Studies, writer, and photographer. Her talk will examine her experience in the Academy, including the events that cemented her decision to leave, the work that she does now as a consultant and program manager, and the life she has crafted post-Academy that allows her to use many of her talents in cross-functional teams.

Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Health Care Ethics, Philosophy, and African American Studies at St. Louis University in Missouri. Her talk will include lessons learned from her own circuitous route through the academy, to encourage younger scholars to follow their own path, even if that path doesn’t conform to conventional wisdom. The event will include a Q&A session.