Fall 2024 Event Series

Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always, are free and open to the public.

Hip-Hop Gen X: Class Reunion @ Orange Mound Public Library

Orange Mound event flyer

Saturday, September 21, 2024
1pm-4pm
Orange Mound Public Library (843 Dallas St. Memphis, TN 38114. See Google Maps)
This event is jointly sponsored by the Memphis Public Libraries, Friends of the Library, the Department of English, and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities
Register for Speaker Panel here.

Join MOCH and the Memphis Public Library to celebrate Memphis's contributions to global hip-hop culture with an afternoon of music, roundtables, and oral histories.

Orange Mound's own DJ Zirk will also speak as the Community Artist Spotlight during the event. There will be a speaker panel featuring Memphis hip-hop icons DJ Spanish Fly, Tommy Wright III, Jus Borne, Steve A., and John “Disco Hound” Moore.

Are you a DJ, MC, producer, or other artist who contributed to the original sound of Memphis hip hop from the 1980s-2000s? Come share your stories and memorabilia. DIG Memphis will also be there with a digitization and oral history team to preserve your story through recorded interviews and the option to digitize cassettes or create digital files from CDs (limit of 3 items per person). You will receive your own copy of the newly digitized material. Any items that are not converted the day of the event can be donated to DIG Memphis to be processed at a later date. Speaker panel registration is limited to 50 seats.

Some Notes on the Literature of the Civil Rights Movement: Maya Angelou’s Reconsideration of History

Hardison photo

Ayesha Hardison // University of Indiana, Bloomington

This event is part of the Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series

Thursday, October 24, 2024
5:30pm Reception // 6:00pm Lecture
Maxine Smith University Center Memphis Room (UC 340)
This event is jointly sponsored by the Department of English and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.

How might we understand history differently when it is documented by writers? This talk explores representations of the Civil Rights Movement and, more broadly, literary engagements with history through Maya Angelou’s writing practice. Reflecting on Angelou’s work as a memoirist as well as her turn to social expression products, Hardison contemplates Black female history making by tracing the nuances of memory, affect, and aesthetics.

Ayesha Hardison is the Susan D. Gubar chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2014), is co-editor with Eve Dunbar of African American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and has published several book chapters as well as articles in African American Review and Meridians. Hardison has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, National Humanities Center Summer Residency Program, and the Ford Foundation. She is director of the History of Black Writing (HBW) and co-editor of the multidisciplinary journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color.

Connecting Slavery, Sex, and Labor: The Black Woman of Blue Spring

Myers photo

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers // University of Indiana, Bloomington

This event is part of the Belle McWilliams Lecture Series

Thursday, November 14, 2024
5:30pm Reception // 6:00pm Lecture
Maxine Smith University Center Memphis Room (UC 340)
This event is jointly sponsored by the Department of History and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.

Join us for a discussion of Julia Ann Chinn, known to locals in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky as the “Mistress of Blue Spring Farm.” She was born in the late 1790s and by the time she was 13-14 years old, Chinn legally belonged Richard Mentor Johnson, a career politician and later ninth vice president of the United States. Within a year of arriving at Blue Spring Farm, Julia gave birth to her first child with Richard.

Dr. Myer's talk will explore Chinn’s complicated status as both human property and plantation wife. In addition to providing sexual labor for her master-husband, Julia oversaw the farm’s enslaved labor force, ran the main house, had access to Richard’s lines of credit, made purchases, signed contracts, organized galas, raised the couple’s children, and helped to run a boarding school for Indigenous boys located at Blue Spring. Her status as Richard’s wife never protected her from labor; it actually increased her workload.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers earned her doctorate in US History from Rutgers University and is currently the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is also Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History. She specializes in Black Women’s History, Antebellum Slavery, and the American South. A committed activist on and off campus, Myers is regularly interviewed by media outlets ranging from PBS and NPR to Fox News on issues of race and gender justice, and she has published editorials and articles on policing, anti-Blackness, and racism writ large in a variety of newspapers including the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Louisville Courier-Journal. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2011 and received several awards including the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the 2011 Anna Julia Cooper-C.L.R. James Book Prize from the National Council for Black Studies. Her latest book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn was published in October 2023 by Ferris & Ferris Books/UNC Press.

2024 Ida B. Wells Conference

Keynote by Briona Simone Jones // University of Connecticut

This event is part of the Ida B. Wells Conference

Friday, November 1, 2024
Time and Place: tba
This event is jointly sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.

The Ida B. Wells Conference is organized by the Ida B. Wells Association, founded by University of Memphis graduate students to promote discussion of philosophical issues arising from the African American experience and to provide a context in which to mentor undergraduates.

Briona Simone Jones is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Connecticut, specializing in African American literature, Feminist and Queer Theory, and Black Queer studies. With a Ph.D. in English and Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Michigan State University, Jones has published a collection of Black Lesbian writings titled Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian thought to date. During her research, Jones developed the concept of “Black Lesbian Aesthetics” to describe the heretical shift in self-definition that transpired after the groundbreaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974.