Spring 2007 Symposium - Saturday, April 14, 2007

“African American Scholarship: New Directions for the 21st Century”

The Jonathan Jasper Wright Institute’s Spring Symposium brings together leading junior and recently-tenured scholars whose research offers “new directions” for interrogating and discussing African American culture in the new millennium. The symposium format encourages scholars to press beyond convential concepts to explore more bold and innovative ways for scholarly research to influence opinion on the status of African Americans in the 21st Century.

All events will take place in Ministers' Hall.  For more information, please contact Dr. Brian L. Johnson, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Jonathan Jasper Wright Institute for the Study of African American History, Culture and Policy, at 803-535-5092, bjohnson@claflin.edu.  To learn more about the Institute, please log on to www.claflin.edu.

Jonathan Jasper Wright (1809-1885)

Associate Justice, SC Supreme Court

Schedule of Events

CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

7:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.

PANEL  A

8:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

Zoe Trodd, (History & Literature, Harvard University)

“The Hole Story: Civil Rights Protest Literature and the Abolitionist Politics of Space”

Fay Yarbrough, (History, The University of Kentucky)

“From Kin to Intruder: Indigenous/African Interactions in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation”

Ben Vinson, (History and Director, Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University)

Senior Respondent: Herman Beavers, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Questions & Answers

PANEL  B

10:15 a.m. - 12:15 a.m.

Jason Glenn, (History of Science, University of Texas-Medical Branch)
”The Birth of the Crack Baby and the History that ‘Myths’ Make”

Adam Biggs, (History of Science/African American Studies, Jonathan Jasper Wright

Institute/Claflin University

“New Negro Therapeutics: Black Doctors and Their Challenge to Scientific Racism in

the Early Twentieth Century”

Charles Price,  (Anthropology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

“Engagement & Application: Actualizing Experience in the Service of Community”

Senior Respondent: Herman Beavers, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Questions & Answers

LUNCH

12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

PANEL  C

1:45 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.

Sonnett Retman, (English and African American Studies, University of Washington)

“The Folklore of Racial Capitalism”

Quianna Whitted, (English and African American Studies, The University of South Carolina-Columbia) -- “Skeptics, Backsliders, and Blasphemers: God and the African-American Writer”

Gene Jarrett, (English and African American Studies, University of  Maryland-College Park)
”The Race Problem Was Not a Theme for Me’: Frank Yerby and the Problem of African American Literature”

Senior Respondent: Herman Beavers, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Questions & Answers

Adjournment