Pizza and Prof: Prof. Roopali Mukherjee, “Understanding the Present: Lessons from the 1619 Project"

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Pizza and Prof Night, taking place on Thursday, April 10 in the Honors Hub, provides a wonderful opportunity for students to get to know professors on a more personal level. The Spring 2025 speaker will be Roopali Mukherjee, Professor of Race, Media, and Communication. Prof. Mukherjee will present a talk titled “Understanding the Present: Lessons from the 1619 Project.”

Mukherjee began teaching as a professor in 1994 but is a new face at UMass, arriving in the fall of 2023 after spending many years teaching in New York. As a Professor of Race, Media, and Communication, Mukherjee sees the subject of her talk, the 1619 Project, as a paragon of the work she undertakes. She describes it as a scholarship that informs but also builds upon our critical capacities to not be “bamboozled” by power, aiming to make each of us better citizens of this country.

Her talk will focus on how the 1619 Project fulfills this role, how it was designed, and the reactionary backlash it has spawned, which, according to Mukherjee, “tells a certain story of what I do.” She also hopes to provide a more personal context to the controversies we see in the media.

“I’m hoping to put a face to the ‘Public Enemy Number 1’ figure we see in the media. I know that some students may not agree with this point of view, but professors have bullseyes on their backs – I hope to put a human face on the so-called ‘boogeyman’ in America.”

She also explained that the 1619 Project is an excellent example of the methodologies she uses in research and hopes to illustrate how writers opened these avenues of history. As a project created by The New York Times, Mukherjee noted that it was a journalistic endeavor, but it has implications for all kinds of fields, especially policy. Her work, and the work of so many others like those of the 1619 Project, opens up the conversation around what she describes as “the afterlives of slavery,” or how the institution of slavery still impacts us to this day.

Mukherjee’s work in this field is informed by her previous training in British Cultural Studies, which attempts to understand how culture has transformed societies and the balance of social power. Her research takes this structure and applies it to race within culture, specifically looking at the African American context. From this, she has gained prominence for the ways in which she analyzes how cultural truths from one culture can “cross-pollinate” other cultures.

She aims for her students to become critical thinkers after leaving her classes. She doesn't want her students to blindly accept everything they see, but to question and engage with the world in whatever discipline brings interest to a student.

“The object of this exercise makes students critical thinkers so that they don't buy everything. You know we have to buy certain things in order to get through the day… But just because you're sitting at the table with certain interests and stakeholders in the world doesn't mean that you sell your soul.”

Come meet and discuss these topics with Prof. Mukherjee on Thursday, April 10 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Honors Hub!