Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies presents

Rethinking the Black Revolt:

Towards a New Paradigm in Black Freedom Studies

March 26, 4:00 p.m., Campus Center 917

Jeanne Theoharis
Professor Political Science
Endowed chair in women's studies,
Brooklyn College at City University New York

Komozi Woodard
Esther Raushenbush Professor of American History
Sarah Lawrence College

Cosponsored by Afo-American Studies and the History Department, UMass Amherst and American Studies at Amherst College.

Refreshments will be served and books by the authors will be available for sale before and after the panel.

Komozi Woodard is the Esther Raushenbush Professor of American history at Sarah Lawrence College. He has also worked extensively as an activist and journalist. Professor Woodard is the author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics and several edited collections including Freedom North and Groundwork (with Jeanne Theoharis) and Want to Start a Revolution? (with Dayo F. Gore and Jeanne Theoharis). He has also authored numerous reviews, chapters, and essays in journals, anthologies, and encyclopedia, including The Black Power Movement, Part I: Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black Radicalism, and "Amiri Baraka, The Congress of African People and Black Power Politics" in The Black Power Movement and serves on the board of directors of the Urban History Association. In addition to his academic work, Professor Woodard has served as an advisor to the Algebra Project and PBS documentaries Eyes on the Prize II and America's War on Poverty.

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science and the endowed chair in Women's Studies at Brooklyn College of CUNY.  She is the author of numerous books and articles on the black freedom struggle including Freedom North and Groundwork (with Komozi Woodard) and Want to Start a Revolution? (with Dayo F. Gore and Komozi Woodard). She also studies the contemporary politics of race and just published Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education (with Gaston Alonso, Celina Su, and Noel Anderson). Professor Theoharis was awarded an AAUW American Fellowship and is currently on leave working on a biography on Rosa Parks and the mythology of the civil rights movement to be published by Beacon Press. In addition to her scholarly work, she is co-founder of Educators for Civil Liberties and is helping to spearhead a movement around the civil rights violations of the domestic side of the War on Terror.

Theoharis and Woodard have emerged as leading scholars in shaping a new wave of Black Freedom studies that has centered concepts such as a long black freedom movement and the Jim Crow north as well as expanded the boundaries of black radicalism and women's central contributions to shaping movement politics. In their public talk, the authors will reflect on and discuss this expansive and cutting edge body of work, its impact on our understanding of the black freedom struggle, and their thoughts on current debates and shifts in the field.