Understanding the Present: Lessons from the 1619 Project

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Pizza & Prof Night provides an opportunity for Honors College students to get to know a professor on a more personal level. The Spring 2025 speaker will be Roopali Mukherjee, Professor of Race, Media, and Communication. Mukherjee will present a talk titled "Understanding the Present: Lessons from the 1619 Project".

Created by journalist and educator Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times Magazine in 2019, The 1619 Project asked a simple but shattering question: what would we bring into focus if we narrated the story of the United States starting not from the events of the Revolutionary War in 1776 but from the year 1619 when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the British colony of Virginia? What does such a re-narration entail? What does it disturb and what do these disruptions reveal about the forces of history and culture, and about struggles over voice and power that remain as familiar as they are formidable in the US today?

Join us for pizza and an informal discussion of research and scholarly interest, followed by lively Q&A and conversation.