The 14th Amendment and the Crises in American Democracy with Sherrilyn Ifill
Monday, November 3, 2025 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Gildenhorn Recital Hall
Sherrilyn Ifill, professor of law and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University, will deliver a Douglass Center for Leadership Through the Humanities public lecture on the 14th Amendment and the Crises in American Democracy. Professor Ifill's decades-long leadership in centering humanity in the law, combined with UMD’s selection of the Constitution as our First Year Book and the current and ongoing attacks on due process and birthright citizenship makes this an important moment to hear her analysis on this amendment, considered one of the most consequential.
Passed during Reconstruction, the 14th Amendment not only set out to protect the citizenship and rights of formerly enslaved Black people, but it also issued safeguards disqualifying former insurrectionists from running for state and federal office. Professor Ifill will offer analysis on the 14th Amendment in contemporary life and politics with a central focus on the human condition in law and democracy.
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.
Thursday, September 25, 2025 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Collective Imagination: Freedom Dreaming and Liberation
Thursday, April 3, 2025 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
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.
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.
March 5 & 6, 2025 • 8PM