Angela Davis, through her activism and scholarship over many decades, has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently, she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness— an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program—and of Feminist Studies. Angela Davis is the author of nine books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender, and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?, about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In 2012, she published a new collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom. Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison..
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Helen Burnham is the Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her primary area of expertise is in the art of nineteenth-century France, for which she received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2007. Prior to joining the MFA in 2008, she was an assistant curator at the Musée d’art américain, Giverny, and a research assistant at the Frick Collection, New York. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow (2000). Dr. Burnham is the curator of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris in collaboration with the Boston Public Library and on view at the Museum of Fine Arts from April 7 – August 4, 2019. She was the co-curator of Matisse in the Studio, at the MFA from April 9 – July 9, 2017 and at the Royal Academy in London from August 1 – November 12, 2017. The Wall Street Journal described the Boston installation as “nothing short of a revelation—and not just about Matisse. I can think of no other exhibition that has told us so much about what artists do and how they think.” At the MFA, Dr. Burnham has organized a number of exhibitions from the collection, including a major traveling show entitled Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan, which traveled to Japanese as well as North American venues and was seen by more than 500,000 visitors. Her smaller installations have included Millet and Rural France (2009) and Manet in Black (2012), and she was the host curator for Leonardo and the Idea of Beauty (2015), as well as Michelangelo Sacred and Profane: Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti (2013).
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Kaitlyn Greenidge Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Glamour, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute and other places. She is a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and a contributing writer to the New York Times. Kerri Greenidge Kerri Greenidge received her Doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, where her specialty included African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her research explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and Democratic populism during the Progressive Era. She has taught at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and Emerson College. Her work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and PBS. For nine years she worked as a historian for Boston African American National Historical Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006). Her forthcoming book is a biography of African-American activist, William Monroe Trotter, which explores the history of racial thought and African American political radicalism in New England at the turn of the century. She teaches at Tufts University where she is currently co-director of the Tufts / African American Freedom Trail Project, and where she serves as Interim Director of the American Studies Program through the University’s Consortium of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Her biography of Boston activist, William Monroe Trotter, will be released by W.W. Norton Press in Winter, 2018. Kirsten Greenidge Kirsten is currently artist in residence at Company One Theatre in Boston with support from the Mellon Foundation’s National Playwright Residency Program administered in partnership with HowlRound, where she co directs Company One’s playwriting program, Playlab. She is the author of BALTIMORE (New Repertory Boston Center for American Performance at Boston University, University of Maryland, University of Iowa), a commission from the Big Ten Consortium at the University of Iowa, BUD NOT BUDDY, an adaptation of the children’s novel by Christopher Paul Curtis, with music by Terance Blanchard (Kennedy Center), THE LUCK OF THE IRISH (Huntington Theatre Company and LCT3), and MILK LIKE SUGAR (La Jolla Playhouse and Playwrights Horizons), which was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award and received an Independent Reviewers of New England Award, a San Diego Critics Award, and a Village Voice Obie Award, among others. Other plays include LITTLE ROW BOAT: OR, CONJECTURE (commissioned by Yale Rep), BOSSA NOVA (Yale Rep) and SANS-CULOTTES IN THE PROMISED LAND (Humana Festival/Actor’s Theatre of Louisville). She’s enjoyed development experiences at the Family Residency at the Space at Ryder Farm, the Huntington’s Summer Play Festival, Cleveland Playhouse as the 2016 Roe Green New Play Award recipient for LITTLE ROW BOAT, The Goodman, Denver Center, Sundance, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, Sundance at Ucross, the O’Neill and San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series with ZENITH. Kirsten is currently working on commissions from the Huntington (COMMON GROUND with Melia Bensussen and MOIRA SPINS), Company One (FOR THE GREATER GOOD), La Jolla Playhouse (TO THE QUICK), Oregon Shakespeare American Revolutions Project (ROLL, BELINDA, ROLL), and Playwrights Horizons (BEACON). She is an alum of New Dramatists, and has proudly graced the Kilroys list of New Plays by women and women identified playwrights several years running. She attended the Playwright’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and Wesleyan University.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Born in Dublin in 1969, EMMA DONOGHUE is an award-winning writer in many genres who makes her home in Canada. She is best known for her 2010 novel ROOM (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and the film adaptation (2015) for which she was nominated for Academy, Golden Globe and Bafta Awards. Emma Donoghue works in fiction both contemporary and historical, long-form and short, for adults and most recently for younger readers (THE LOTTERYS series). A playwright whose SELECTED PLAYS was published in 2015, Donoghue also increasingly writes for the screen, adapting her own books as well as those of others for TV and film, as well as developing original projects.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
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