Dr. Seema Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting in 2017 for her reporting on a mass shooting. As a former officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she was deployed as strategic advisor to foreign governments, won awards from the United States Public Health Service for leading epidemic investigations, and was principal investigator for scientific studies on disease outbreaks and their long-term consequences.
Virtual
Associate Professor in the Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, and Founding Member for TIME’SUP Healthcare, Dr. Esther Choo is known as a bold and innovative voice on gender and racial equity in healthcare and an advocate for new frameworks for building positive and productive workplaces.
Virtual
Sybrina Fulton, who earned a bachelor's degree in English from Florida Memorial University, is dedicating her life to transforming family tragedy into social change. Since the death of her 17-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, during the violent confrontation in 2012, Fulton has become an inspiring spokesperson for parents and concerned citizens across the country. Her book, co-authored with Tracy Martin, Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, shares the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement that awoke a nation’s conscience.
Virtual
Recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize with Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tomet, Alicia Garza believes Black communities deserve what all communities deserve — to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. That’s what drives Alicia Garza as an innovator, strategist, internationally recognized organizer, and writer. In 2018, she founded the Black Futures Lab, which works to make Black people powerful in politics. In her first book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, Alicia Garza shares her thoughts on politics and pop culture from her podcast Lady Don't Take No. She warns you that hashtags don’t start movements — people do.
Virtual
Daniel Immerwahr (pronounced IM-mer-var) is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, where he teaches global history and U.S. foreign relations. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard 2015), a history of U.S. grassroots antipoverty strategies, won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award for best work of U.S. intellectual history. His second, How to Hide an Empire, a retelling of U.S. history with the overseas parts of the country included in the story, is a national bestseller. Part of the Boston Public Library’s mission is to support lifelong learning, education and civic engagement that is “Free to All” including programs that bring figures and experts of note into conversation and dialogue. Arc of History: Contested Perspectives is a mini-series informed by historical moments and movements, recent and long past. The series is presented virtually in conjunction with the Lowell Institute and is produced and archived by the WGBH Forum network. For more information, please visit https://forum-network.org/series/history-talks-boston-public-library/.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Barbara Berenson is the author of Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers (2018), Boston in the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution (2014), and Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism (2011, 2d ed. 2014). She is the co-editor of Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts (2012). Learn more at http://www.barbarafberenson.com/. art of the Boston Public Library’s mission is to support lifelong learning, education and civic engagement that is “Free to All” including programs that bring figures and experts of note into conversation and dialogue. Arc of History: Contested Perspectives is a mini-series informed by historical moments and movements, recent and long past. The series is presented virtually in conjunction with the Lowell Institute and is produced and archived by the WGBH Forum network. For more information, please visit https://forum-network.org/series/history-talks-boston-public-library/.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
In 1967, Katherine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon as a numbered entrant. During her run, race official Jock Semple attempted to stop Switzer and grab her official bib; however, he was shoved to the ground by Switzer's boyfriend, Thomas Miller, who was running with her, and she completed the race. It was not until 1972 that women were allowed to run the Boston Marathon officially. Fifty years later, Kathrine Switzer successfully ran the Boston Marathon again at age 70. Switzer was originally going to join us during the week of the 2020 Boston Marathon to discuss these barrier-breaking moments on the racecourse and in life. The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in the cancellation of the Boston Marathon in April 2020. In its stead, the Boston Athletic Association is hosting a series of virtual events in the second week of September. Learn more at https://www.baa.org/124th-boston-marathon-be-held-virtually. Part of the Boston Public Library’s mission is to support lifelong learning, education and civic engagement that is “Free to All” including programs that bring figures and experts of note into conversation and dialogue. Arc of History: Contested Perspectives is a mini-series informed by historical moments and movements, recent and long past. The series is presented virtually in conjunction with the Lowell Institute and is produced and archived by the WGBH Forum network. For more information, please visit https://forum-network.org/series/history-talks-boston-public-library/.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
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
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