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98th Annual ASALH Convention Click here to book your hotel room for the 2013 |
Plenary Sessions
All plenary sessions are open to the public
Please click on a title for more information
Thursday, Plenary I -- African American Studies Past and Present: A Session in Appreciation of John H. Bracey
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Dr. Shawn Alexander (chair) Shawn Leigh Alexander, who received his PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, is an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and the director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. His area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Click here for full biography |
| Dr. Ernest Allen | |
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Dr. Darlene Clark Hine Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned her BA degree at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and her PhD degree from Kent State University. She began her teaching career at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and was Vice Provost and Professor of History at Purdue University. Hine was John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History at Michigan State University. Hine has received numerous awards including a 2002 Detroit News Michiganian of the Year Award. Click here for full biography |
| Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans | |
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Dr. John Higginson Publications include articles in African Economic History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and the Revue canadienne des études africaines. A monograph entitled A Working Class in the Making: The Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga and the African Mineworkers, 1907-1949, was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 1989. At present he is working on a book entitled The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: State Violence and the Economic Transformation of Southern Africa, 1900-1980. His article "Liberating the Captives: Watchtower as an Avatar of Colonial Revolt in Southern Africa and Katanga Province, Belgian Congo, 1907-1941," was published in The Journal of Social History. In 1993-94, he was the recipient of the Research and Writing Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. Click here for full biography |
Friday, Plenary II -- How Free is Free?: The March Since 1963
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Dr. Clarence Lang (chair): Clarence Lang is an Associate Professor of African & African African American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he is a former Langston Hughes Visiting Professor. His research interests are African American working-class history, the Black Freedom Movement, and the twentieth-century urban Midwest. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75; and co-editor with Robbie Lieberman of Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: "Another Side of the Story." He is currently completing, with Andrew \Kersten, an edited volume on A. Philip Randolph. Professor Lang has published in Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, The Black Scholar, New Politics, Against the Current, and The Chronicle Review. He is an Associate Editor of The Journal of African American History, a Board Member of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA), and a past member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). |
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Dr. Hasan Jeffries Hasan Kwame Jeffries was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse with a BA in history in 1994.While matriculating at Morehouse, he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and initiated into the Pi Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. After graduating from Morehouse, he enrolled at Duke University, where he earned a MA in American history in 1997 and a PhD in African American history in 2002. In 2003, Hasan joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in the history department and at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. He was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure. Click here for full biography |
| Dr. Joyce Ladner | |
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Dr. David Roediger David Roediger teaches history at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University and a PhD from Northwestern, where he studied under Sterling Stuckey and George Fredrickson. Roediger has taught working class and African American history at University of Missouri, and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. His books include The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working Toward Whiteness. His The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. His edited books include the Modern Library edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. |
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Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams Rhonda Y. Williams, PhD, is an associate professor of history, the founder and director of the postdoctoral fellowship in African American studies at Case Western Reserve, and the director of the Social Justice Institute. The award-winning author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality, Williams has been honored by History News Network as a Top Young Historian and is listed in the 2009 edition of Who's Who in Black Cleveland. Her research interests include the manifestations of race and gender inequality on urban space and policy, the history of low-income people's lives and activism, and illicit narcotics economies in the post-1940s United States. Click here for full biography |
Saturday, Plenary III -- Making Emancipation: From a Black Reconstruction to a Black President
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Dr. Vernon Burton (chair) Orville Vernon Burton is Creativity Professor of Humanities, Professor of History and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute. From 2008-2010, he was the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I CHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. At the University of Illinois, he continues to chair the I-CHASS advisory board and is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002-2010. Burton serves as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois. Click here for full biography |
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Dr. Edna Greene Medford Dr. Edna Greene Medford is Professor and Chairman of the Department of History at Howard University. Specializing in 19th-century African-American history, she also teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in Civil War and Reconstruction, Colonial America, and the Jacksonian Era. Dr. Medford was educated at Hampton Institute (VA), the University of Illinois (Urbana), and the University of Maryland (College Park), where she received her Ph.D. in history. She lectures widely to scholarly and community-based groups and has presented to international audiences on topics from Alexis de Tocqueville to President Lincoln and emancipation. Click here for full biography |
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Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley, is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994); Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (Beacon 2001); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). Click here for full biography |
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Dr. Paul Ortiz Paul Ortiz serves as Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and associate professor of history at the University of Florida. His publications include the book Emancipation Betrayed, a history of the Black Freedom struggle in Florida, and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South. He is the recipient of numerous book awards including the Lillian Smith Book Prize awarded by the Southern Regional Council & the Harry T. and Harriett V. Moore Book Prize bestowed by the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology. His forthcoming monograph is titled: Our Separate Struggles are Really One: African American and Latino Histories and will be published by Beacon Press. Paul is also working on a book with his former dissertation adviser, William H. Chafe, titled Behind the Veil: African Americans in the Age of Segregation. He is writing the introduction to the forthcoming book Dissident at Large: The Memoirs of Stetson Kennedy. Click here for full biography |