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
- 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.
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Some Notes on the Literature of the Civil Rights Movement: Maya Angelou’s Reconsideration of History
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.
Connecting Slavery, Sex, and Labor: The Black Woman of Blue Spring
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.
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.
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.