Join the Anti-Black Racism Initiative, the Baha'i Chair for World Peace and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences for a two-day conference on eradicating racism in the DMV.
When:
Thu, Oct 16, 2025 - 6:00PM
to
Fri, Oct 17, 2025 - 4:30PM
Where:
Atrium, Adele H. Stamp Student Union
Host:
ABRI, the Baha'i Chair for World Peace, and BSOS
Choreographer, director and performer Kayla Farrish has become renowned for work that seamlessly incorporates dance, narrative theater, film and sound score in service of transforming invisibilized histories into liberation. Put Away the Fire, Dear is a group dance-theater work unraveling American cinema, in which six marginalized characters defy their inherited roles and reimagine new narratives for themselves. Jumping through portals spanning reality and cinema, they change the lens, uprooting power and their distorted existence. We connect with those of the past like Zora Neale Hurston, Oscar Michaux, Ethel Waters, Bojangles and onwards. This work invites BIPOC audiences to see their worlds reflected and offers collective liberation in dreaming of our unwritten stories. In 100 minutes, this wild dance-theater production breaks down whose imagination we are living in with shifting scenic design by Dyer Rhoads and live music by Alex MacKinnon. Following her recent run at Chelsea Factory NY (2025) and American Dance Festival (2024), Farrish’s company makes its Clarice Presents debut with the D.C. area premiere of this vibrant multimedia performance.
Five Black DeafBlind actors bring to life the untold stories of DeafBlind enslaved people in a groundbreaking play.
A Touch of Slavery is a radically new kind of theater, performed by DeafBlind actors in Protactile, the language of the DeafBlind community. As a tactile form of communication, Protactile requires a different model of performance. Actors and audience members interact directly. In this production, a collaboration between PT411, Richmond Area Black Deaf Advocates, and TDPS, audiences will experience a moving journey through the lives of nineteenth-century DeafBlind slaves. Knowledge of Protactile or American Sign Language is NOT required for this production. Actors will adapt their performance to fit each person’s needs.
Sony Ton-Aimé is a Haitian poet, translator and art administrator. His poetry collection Konbit is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, (2026). He is the author of the chapbook, LaWomann (2019) and the Haitian Creole translator of Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour's Story.
Thursday, September 25, 2025 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Tawes Hall, 2115
Dr. Corrine Collins is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on contemporary African diaspora literature and culture. Her research focuses on representations of interracial intimacy in twentieth and twenty-first century African diaspora literature and popular culture.
In this talk, Collins examines the food and lifestyle content of Nara Aziza Smith and Meghan Markle. Nara Smith rose to fame with ASMR Instagram and TikTok videos of her making food from scratch in haute couture gowns, and Meghan Markle recently returned to the food lifestyle production with her 2025 Netflix show With Love, Meghan. Collins analyzes the ways Smith's and Markle's content intersects with their black multiracial identities to argue that both women emphasize the domestic as a space of interracial healing, peaceful love, and abundance. In doing so, Collins engages with the legacy of "mulatta," and argues that the black multiracial woman has become a figure of racial and domestic (re)productivity in the twenty-first century.
Collective Imagination: Freedom Dreaming and Liberation
Date and Time: 2:00 pm-3:30 pm September 25, 2025
Location: Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, University of Maryland
A reception will follow.
Benjamin's talk, Collective Imagination: Freedom Dreaming and Liberation, will address how science and technology reinforce social inequalities and the vital role of grassroots organizers who boldly imagine more just possibilities.
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Kogod Theatre
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
The story of Anansi and his trickster family is put into a sleek hip hop context for Hip Hop Anansi, a modern, all-ages adaptation of a traditional Ashanti folktale. Anansi wants the Golden Fly Pie Award for Tricksterism and is not above outwitting his own family to win it. But his rhyming, break dancing, graffiti-ing children are ready to claim the prize in their own right. Paige Hernandez, Associate Artistic Director of Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, directs this new vision of a classic African folk tale as penned by the acclaimed actress, playwright and singer-songwriter Eisa Davis.
All performances include integrated open captions.
PERFORMANCE DATES
Fri, Apr 18, 2025 • 7:30PM
Sat, Apr 19, 2025 • 1PM & 4PM
Fri, Apr 25, 2025 • 7:30PM
Sat, Apr 26, 2025 • 11AM
Learn more and buy tickets here.
Please join us for a talk by Professor Robin D. G. Kelley of UCLA. This event is part of the Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture Series.
About the Speaker:
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nahs Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and a public intellectual whose numerous books include co-edited volumes such as The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015); Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World ( 2018); as well as monographs, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); Thelonious Monk (2009); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002).
Thursday, April 3, 2025 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The David C. Driskell Center, 1207
Join us for the David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture featuring Dr. Kellie Jones as she presents “Suzanne Jackson: Ecologies of Abstraction.” The evening begins with a tea reception at 5 p.m., followed by the announcement of the Book Award at 6 p.m. and the lecture at 6:15 p.m.
This event also marks the kickoff of the 35th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium, organized by Howard University, beginning on April 3.
Deity of the Circle is an installation and performance for three voices, clarinet, and electronics co-created by Armond Dorsey, Bonita Oliver, and Eli Berman.
Worship practices from African and Jewish diasporas inform the design of unique visual and musical storytelling objects made of metal, wood, fabric, microphones, speakers, and electrical circuits. A composite sound sculpture made of PVC and EMT pipes serves as an installation piece for the exhibit. In April 2025, the artists will assemble this composite sculpture live during a 40-minute performance. They will attach handheld and wearable components of the sculpture to its base, placed at the center of the gallery, before playing the sculpture as a communal instrument. According to the trio, “Through our exhibition and performance, we hybridize new worship rituals for collectively grieving our historical traumas while illuminating the multidimensionality and timelessness of our human desire to connect with the past and future through cyclical time.”
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Cafritz Foundation Theatre
ABOUT THE EVENT
Groundbreaking Black puppeteer Megan Peace Piphus will share her experiences and career highlights, including her work on Sesame Street. Dean Stephanie Shonekan will moderate the conversation. Megan will also do a short performance with her favorite puppets.
Join us for a powerful film screening of Black Lives Matter in Latin America, followed by an insightful discussion with Dr. Gladys Mitchell-Walthour. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage in a thought-provoking conversation about race, social justice and the impact of global activism.
Monday, March 10, 2025 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The David C. Driskell Center, and Online
Wild Futures: Taking Flight offers a chance to reflect on how knowledge of the environment and ecology played crucial roles in the ways that freedom seekers pursued their escape from enslavement.
In narratives of freedom, we find an extensive engagement with bondage (“The Plantation”) and, on the other hand, arrival (“The North”). That said, the middle, that space in between, can sometimes be either obscured or ignored. What, then, in a practical sense, did seeking freedom require? How did freedom seekers deploy their knowledge of their natural environment to escape bondage? How were these knowledges acquired? And what kinds of responsibilities do we have to seek out and understand this knowledge as expertise?
This year, we in WGSS invite you into a conversation about what it means to make yourself ready to take flight, the kinds of knowledge integral to taking flight, and how these knowledges were deployed in seeking freedom. How was the wild/wilderness both an accomplice and constraint in these processes?
Wild Futures: Taking Flight, then, builds on multiple iterations of wild - metaphoric, literal, ontological – to consider why and how liberation calls us to wrestle with the wild and to be wild as integral to what it means to be free; and, to invoke Mariame Kaba, we want to reflect on the ways that these historical antecedents can function as a kind of technology that holds clues for contemporary modes of activism.
March 5 & 6, 2025 • 8PM
Considered “one of the most consistently excellent troupes working today” by The New York Times, the MacArthur and Doris Duke Award-winning choreographer Kyle Abraham's dance company A.I.M has solidified his position at the very forefront of the contemporary dance world. Founded in 2006, A.I.M's focus has always been squarely on movement galvanized by Black culture and history, with an emphasis on the rich intersectional tapestry of Black and Queer stories. The work, informed by and made in conjunction with artists across a range of disciplines, entwines a sensual and provocative vocabulary with a strong emphasis on music, text, video and visual art. Abraham has crafted more than 15 original pieces with the company that make up the core of their current repertory alongside works by Trisha Brown, Andrea Miller, Bebe Miller, Doug Varone and A.I.M dancer and early-career choreographer Keerati Jinakunwiphat.
Ntozake Shange’s highly influential 1976 choreopoem for colored girls… might well be the most performed and important piece of theater created expressly by and for Black women in the history of the United States. The work has been adapted for both film and television and can boast a Tony-nominated Broadway revival as recently as 2022. UMD School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies faculty members Ama Law and Fatima Quander direct a loving rendition of Shange’s masterpiece that proves its timelessness.
Performances February 21-28 at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
Don't miss an evening with Juilliard-trained composer, percussionist and pianist Julius Rodriguez.
Thursday, February 27 at 8pm, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
Thursday, February 27-Friday, February 28
H.J. Patterson Hall, rooms 2124 & 2130, and virtually
Join us for the 2nd Annual UMD ATLAS Conference on February 27-28! This year's conference offers two full days of sessions exploring the theme of “Agency, Decolonization, and the Politics of Knowledge Production.”
Thursday, February 27-Friday, February 28
H.J. Patterson Hall, rooms 2124 & 2130, and virtually
Join us for the 2nd Annual UMD ATLAS Conference on February 27-28! This year's conference offers two full days of sessions exploring the theme of “Agency, Decolonization, and the Politics of Knowledge Production.”
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Tawes Hall, 2115
John Ernest, the Judge Hugh Morris Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware, will deliver the Stringer lecture. The generous bequest from the estate of John G. Stringer is intended for the “advancement of British and American 18th and 19th century literary studies.” Since its inception in 2014, the Stringer Fund has helped sponsor a range of speakers and professionalization events for graduate students specializing in 18th- and 19th-century literary studies.
