Keynote Speakers
Karla Slocum
“The Long Movement for Black Towns”
Saturday, April 15th at 4:45 pm in the Summit Grand Ballroom
Karla Slocum is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair of Public Policy, Professor of Anthropology, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the recent past director of the Institute of African American Research, a role she held for over eight years. Slocum’s scholarship is devoted to ethnographic studies of place, race, history, and Black rurality. Her work has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the School for Advanced Research, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Her published articles and book chapters have appeared in such journals and edited volumes as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Transforming Anthropology, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and the Routledge Companion on Inter-American Studies. Slocum is the co-creator of #TulsaSyllabus, a digital resource guide centering interdisciplinary and multi-genre sources on and relevant to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. She is also co-founder and co-chair of Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration, an event that facilitated global community-engaged research partnerships and exchanges. Currently, Slocum is pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, Mapping Black Towns, to digitally visualize the story of U.S. Black settlements in their social, geographical, political, and material contexts.


Josephine McDonagh
“Heathcliff and Other Child Refugees in Literature and History”
Friday, April 14th at 5:00 pm in the Summit Grand Ballroom
Josephine McDonagh is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and an editor of Modern Philology. Before coming to Chicago in 2017, she taught in universities in the UK, most recently at King’s College London. She is the author of Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (2021), Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1880 (2003), George Eliot (1997) and De Quincey’s Disciplines (1994), and has co-edited a number of volumes and special issues including most recently (with Supra Chaudhuri, Brian Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan) Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2018), (with Briony Wickes) special issue: “Writing Opium and the Opium Wars”, Literature and History, (2020); and (with Jonathan Sachs), “New Work on Literature and Migration”; Modern Philology (2021). Her current work is on migration and literature, currently focusing on issues around globalization in the 1820s and 1830s.
Photo credit: Jason Smith