Events

Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. Her first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) —argues that African American newspapers fostered Black sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Gallon is also the author of the field defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Her more recent work focuses on the spatial relationship between reading and residential segregation in Baltimore in the twentieth century.  She is aso working on a book project on race, digital technology, and health equity. Gallon is the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council and Spencer Foundation.

Postdoctoral Scholar Zifeng Liu, “Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary, 1949-1976”; with guests Dr. Vijay Prashad, Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, and Dr. Gerald Horne, author, and Moores Professor of History at University of Houston.

Presented by ARC Postdoctoral Scholar Brittany Frederick, “The Capstone of My Education: Black Women, Student Power, and the Freedom Struggle in Higher Education”; with guests Professor Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Department chair of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and Louise R. Noun Chair in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College, Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, Professor and Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University, and Dr. Christina Haynes, Professor of African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.

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.