Category: News

Post Pardon: The Opera

News

Friday, June 23 and Friday June 30

Post Pardon: The Opera

Post Pardon is an opera-in-development that draws on African-diasporic spirituality and folklore to tell the story of Willow, a queer activist confronted with the ghost of her estranged mother who committed murder-suicide. Join on June 23 from 6:30 – 8:30pm EST for a conversation moderated by director Ellen Sebastian Chang, librettist Arisa White and composer Jessica Jones discuss their creative process for the making of Post Pardon. Collaborators for over two decades, their talk will lend a deeper understanding of the musical influences, botanical references, and sociopolitical realities inspiring this new opera.

The first showing of Post Pardon will be on Friday, June 30 at Greene Block + Studios, starting at 6:30 pm EST.

 

A Community Reading of William Apress’s Eulogy on Metacom

News

Friday, April 28th at 6:00 pm in the Old South Meeting House

Hosted by Revolutionary Spaces

Why is it that historic figures such as Samuel Adams, James Otis, and John Hancock are remembered as heroes, yet Metacom—the Wampanoag leader whom the English called King Philip—is virtually unknown? The year 2025 will mark the 350th anniversary of the devastating and bloody conflict between New England colonists and Indigenous people that is most commonly known to history as King Philip’s War. However, very little is known about his campaign to end English mistreatment and his fight for independence and property rights for his people. Throughout the 1830s, Willam Apess, a Pequot minister and activist, continued fighting for Indian rights.

Revolutionary Spaces is proud to celebrate the legacy of both Apess and Metacom at A Community Reading of William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip (Metacom), where we will commemorate the ideals for which they fought—ideals that were not so different from those that Americans fought for in 1775. Join Revolutionary Spaces and its partners, the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Northeastern Humanities Center, on Friday, April 28 at Old South Meeting House as we bring together Native Americans in New England and the general public to examine a critical moment in colonial history.

Moderating the evening’s program will be J. Cedric Woods (Lumbee), Director of INENAS. Drew Lopenzina, Professor of Early American and Native American Literature at Old Dominion University, will provide historical context for the eulogy and the 19th-century events that informed Apess’s writing. Guest speakers will then read excerpts from the eulogy followed by a brief panel discussion to critically address the history of Native American conversion to Christianity, the significance of King Philip’s War, and the importance of Apess’s eulogy.

This program is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 6:00 pm and the reading will begin at 6:30 pm. A reception with light snacks and drinks will occur immediately following the program for audience members to connect and celebrate with the community. Register here. 

Revolutionary Spaces and its partners would like to thank the following funders for their generous support of this program:

2023 Sidore Lecture Series

News

The Ethics of Encounter: Research, Communities, and Repair

Dunfey/Sidore Symposium 2023

A public event exploring ethical, collaborative, and reparative aspects of social scientists’
research and teaching and the curated and community spaces they inhabit. Free food and refreshments will be provided. To register and learn more, click here.

Hayes Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Humanities

News

UNH Center for the Humanities

UNH Center for the Humanities Seeking a distinguished visiting scholar

The University of New Hampshire’s Center for the Humanities seeks a distinguished visiting scholar to help reinvigorate the spirit and purpose of the James H. and Claire Short Hayes Professor of the Humanities Chair, a generously endowed faculty chair meant to concentrate on New Hampshire’s history, culture, and government and to be a focal point within the University for research and teaching. To this end, the visiting scholar position will have two objectives: 1) to conduct compelling, publicly engaged humanities research in New Hampshire and 2) to convene workshops, communal conversations, and other occasions with UNH faculty to help build capacity for future Hayes Chair applications. Salary support, research funds, and programming funds will be provided to the visiting scholar. The terms of the visiting residency can be designed collaboratively with the scholar and the Center for the Humanities, where the Hayes Chair is housed, but would need to include a meaningful amount of time engaging with the university community on site at the UNH Durham campus. More information here.

Ruha Benjamin

News

Viral Justice: Pandemics, Police Violence & Public Bioethics

Virtual & In-person Lecture | March 9th, 2023 | 6:00pm

Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just DataLab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Ruha earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA, and Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’sInstitute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation 2020 Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Live stream here.

Sponsored by the Colby Colleges’ Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab with co-sponsorship from the African-American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, Science, Technology, and Society, Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2023 Symposium | Faculty of Color Working Group

News

The Corporate University and Shrinking BIPOC Supports: Where do We Go from Here?

Virtual Symposium | May 12–13, 2023

In the fall of 2018, BIPOC faculty from the New England region formed the Faculty of Color Working Group (FOCWG) to advocate for our collective success and wellbeing. Given the challenges facing BIPOC scholars and educators in the academy, we came to acknowledge the urgent need to build our own community systems of support. The first of three annual symposia was held shortly after, in spring of 2019, with generous support from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New England Humanities Consortium, and University of Connecticut. We now invite applications for this year’s virtual symposium on Friday, May 12, 2023. The following day, on Saturday, May 13, symposium goers will have a special in-person opportunity to break bread in community at one of three regional hubs (locations TBD).  

This year’s theme, “The Corporate University and Shrinking BIPOC Supports: Where Do We Go from Here?”, seeks to apprehend the challenges of withering institutional interest in fighting injustice and committing resources. Priorities are revealed in the dissonance between mass campus equity statements and habitual administrative practices of soft funding, inadequate outcomes and accountability, underfunding, and rudder-less initiatives. In another vein, equity-minded funding agencies shift their priorities as exemplified by the Ford Foundation’s new emphasis away from support for BIPOC scholars toward non-academic economic and racial justice movement-building. Our conversations will be led by stellar thinkers and advocates, such as keynote Dr. Lorgia García Peña (Tufts) and presenters Drs. Davarian Baldwin (Trinity College), Sandy Grande (UConn), and Touba Ghadessi (Wheaton College). The symposium offers a space to exchange, debate, and build energy within and across institutions. We hope to identify tools and pathways to sculpt the work environments that so often negate and diminish our contributions. Speakers will take up such concerns as the impacts of neoliberal environments on gender non-conforming faculty of color; how to navigate and transform campus climates that are unapologetically guided by employee economic precarity; racism, sexism, xeno, homo, and trans-phobias; unchecked supremacies; institutional legacies of indigenous land theft; and disempowered Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs whose role in radical organizational change must be assessed using data, rather than assumed.  Learn more here.  

Affective Currents: Moving the Environmental Humanities

News

Affective Currents: Moving the Environmental Humanities

The Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College invites applications for short-term remote fellows to participate in the Spring 2023 Humanities Institute entitled “Affective Currents: Moving the Environmental Humanities.” Apply and learn more using this link: https://jobs.chronicle.com/job/37407954/fellow-in-environmental-humanities-spring-2023

From the Fragments: Places and People in Colonized New England

News

This July the UNH Center for the Humanities will host two week-long summer institutes for K–12 educators made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more about the program here.

If you know teachers (or other educators, broadly defined) who might be interested, send them our way to learn new stories of a dynamic colonial history in New England! Applications are due by March 3, 2023.

Faculty of Color Working Group logo

Applications Now Open for FOCWG Mellon Mentors Program

FOCWG, News

The FOCWG invites applications for participation in the inaugural cohort of the FOCWG Mellon Mentors program. The FOCWG Mellon Mentors Program aims to partner early-career BIPOC faculty with trained senior mentors to create enduring professional relationships that will provide guidance, resources, and support to early career scholars as they cement their foothold in academia. The goal of the FOCWG Mellon Mentors Program is the creation of mentoring cohorts that offer multiple models of mentoring and expands the network of support for program participants.

Applications are due July 31, 2021. See the full call for applications for more details.

New England Humanities Consortium Seed Grants. Proposals due September 15, 2021

2021 NEHC Seed Grant Applications Now Open

News

Applications are now open for the 2021 NEHC seed grants. These competitive seed grants are for research initiatives in the humanities that seek to capitalize on the collaborative network and potential of the consortium. Applications seeking to sustain, and build on, previously funded NEHC initiatives that demonstrated success are also welcome. Awards of up to $5,000 will be made. (For projects whose total budgets exceed $5,000 applicants must list additional committed funding sources and amounts.) Priority will be given to applications demonstrating concrete plans for consortium membership involvement. Such involvement can take different forms, but will typically involve, e.g. direct collaboration between two or more member institutions and/or active solicitation of faculty, staff, or students exclusively from member institutions. Applications are welcome from individuals or teams, but the PI must be on the faculty of a NEHC member institution.

Applications are due September 15, 2021, and must be submitted to your home humanities institute or center. See the request for proposals for full details and submission guidelines.

Scroll to top