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The UMass Amherst Department of History's Writer-in-Residency program invites to campus a variety of "widely-read" authors; this year's Writer-in-Residence, Stanford University's Allyson Hobbs, certainly fits this description. In addition to serving as a contributing staff writer for NewYorker.com, Hobbs has been featured on cnn.com, slate.com and in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor. She has also been featured on C-Span, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, as well as delivered a TEDx talk.

At Stanford, Hobbs currently serves as Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of African and African American Studies. Her most recent project (forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2019) is a book titled Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights. This work will guide her lecture of the same name, to be delivered on Tuesday, March 21 at 4 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge. This talk will explore the simultaneous allure and inaccessibility of driving that met many black Americans at the onset of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, The 11th Annual Writer in Residence Lecture featuring Allyson Hobbs has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

"Professor Allyson Hobbs is a leading scholar and public intellectual whose work illuminates the complexity of African American life and the persistence of racism in the American experience," said Barbara Krauthamer, Associate Professor of History. "Her residency in the UMass History Department will give our students and the entire campus community a wonderful opportunity to engage with a highly acclaimed scholar of African American history." Professor Stephen Platt, also of the History Department, expressed similar excitement for the program. "It's easy sometimes to forget that history is an art as well as a social science," he said, "and for years now the WIR program has played a crucial role in engaging our graduate students with established writers at the top of their game who can talk with them in detail about the craft of writing history and inspire them to reach out to the wider reading public in their own work."

This event is free and open to the public and coincides with Hobbs' week-long residency at UMass Amherst.