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Professor Sharon Monteith Inaugural Lecture

Social Justice Synergies Between Writing and Action

Sharon Monteith
Networking | Public lectures

This lecture will foreground unsung activist-writers, individuals who rarely made media headlines in the way that Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. did. It draws on Monteith’s new research which stretches from the Reconstruction era of the 1860s and 1870s to the #Black Lives Matter movement.

  • From: Wednesday 23 November 2022, 5.30 pm
  • To: Wednesday 23 November 2022, 7.30 pm
  • Registration: 5.30 pm
  • Location: Lecture Theatre 3, Teaching and Learning Building, Clifton Campus, NG11 8NS
  • Booking deadline: Tuesday 22 November 2022, 12.00 am
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Event details

Among writers for whom the long African American freedom struggle for civil and human rights is context and cause, Toni Cade Bambara asserted, “Writing is one of the ways I do my work in the world.” Bambara drew on archives, praising activists for preserving the organizational records she mined for fiction, films, and plays. Activism may be better understood through the process of its narration. In literature, hidden histories may be recovered, gaps in historical records bridged, racist continuities and conspiracies exposed. Activist writing also operates as a precision tool with which to skewer white supremacists.

Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History in the School of Arts and Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust in the form of a Major Research Fellowship, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, and in the US by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. In 2022, her book SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South won the C. Hugh Holman Book Award presented by the US-based Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and the American Studies Network Book Prize awarded by the European Association of American Studies (EAAS).

Programme

5.30 pm

Registration and welcome refreshments

6 pm

Welcome talk

6.05 pm

Lecture begins

6.50 pm

Close and thanks by Executive Dean

7 pm

Drinks reception

7.30 pm

Close

Location details

Address:

Teaching and Learning Building
Clifton Campus
 NG11 8NS

Parking:

Take a look at our maps and directions page to find the best parking for you to our Clifton campus.

Travel Info:

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Past event

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