The UMass Amherst Libraries host the 23rd Annual Du Bois Lecture, Viewing the Past Through the Eyes of the Present: A Dialogue Around the Work of Kara Walker, on Wednesday, February 22, 2017, from 4 – 6 p.m., in the Commonwealth Honors College Event Hall 160, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The lecture features an interactive panel comprised of Dr. Barbara Krauthamer, associate professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School, UMass Amherst; Dr. Traci Parker, assistant professor, W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, UMass Amherst; and Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, assistant professor of history, Smith College.
The conversation, facilitated by Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, associate professor of anthropology, UMass Amherst, and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center, will engage these scholars on race, gender, and slavery through their perspective fields to highlight the truths embedded in the work of Kara Walker and other artists across the African Diaspora.
Each year, the Libraries mark the February 23, 1868 birthday of W. E. B. Du Bois with a lecture on a topic relating to his life and legacy. The Library was named for Du Bois in 1994 and is home to the extensive W.E.B. Du Bois Papers.
The lecture is presented in partnership with the University Museum of Contemporary Art and its current exhibit Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power (February 2 – April 30, 2017) and is co-sponsored in part by the Randolph and Cecile Bromery Endowment for the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the UMass Amherst Libraries.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served and copies of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery and Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War will be for sale and signing by Dr. Krauthamer and Dr. Stordeur Pryor.