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Here's a list of ATLAS events and other campus happenings that may be of interest to the ATLAS community. If you have an event you'd like to have listed, please let us know about it!


Petrou Lecture: Robin D. G. Kelley

Thursday, April 10, 2025 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Tawes Hall, 2115

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:

Headshot of Robin D. G. Kelley

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).

Learn more here.

David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Kellie Jones

An image of a Black woman wearing glasses on the right. On the left, text says "David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture, Dr. Kellie Jones"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.

Learn more and register.

Deity of the Circle Performance

Three portraits: A man with curly hair and a beard outdoors, a woman with short natural hair in a floral blouse, and a person with long hair, a beanie, and glasses holding a frame drum.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.”

Learn more and RSVP here.

Speaking of Books with Bayley J. Marquez: Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space

Speaking of Books with Bayley J. Marquez: Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous SpaceThroughout 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.

Learn more here.

A Night with Megan Peace Piphus

Megan Peace Piphus

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.

Learn more here.

Film Screening: "Black Lives Matter in Latin America"

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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.

Learn more here.

Wild Futures: Taking Flight - Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration 2025

Wild Futures Taking flight poster on a white background

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.

Learn more and register.

A.I.M by Kyle Abraham: Mixed Repertory

AIMMarch 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.

Learn more and buy tickets.

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

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


Learn more and buy tickets here

The 2nd Annual UMD ATLAS Conference

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ATLAS 2025 conference banner

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.” 

Learn more and register.

The 2nd Annual UMD ATLAS Conference

Image
ATLAS 2025 conference banner

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.” 

Learn more and register.

John Ernest on "The Art of the Impossible: African American and American Literary Studies in Threatening Times"

American map

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.

Learn more here.

UMD CARNAVAL 2025

UMD CARNAVALTuesday, February 25, 2025 11:00 am - 7:30 pm
St Mary’s Hall, Multipurpose Room

Get ready for an unforgettable day packed with music, vibrant dance, a captivating cinema workshop, insightful reflections, delicious snacks, refreshing beverages and an epic party atmosphere! Dive into the heart of this celebration and immerse yourself in the rich cultural traditions that make it truly special. Don’t miss out—this is an experience you’ll want to be part of!

Learn more here.

Legacies of Loss: From the Barn to the Bus Stop

SJA logoJoin the BSU-UMD Social Justice Alliance for a powerful and thought-provoking discussion on the lynching of Emmett Till and the modern-day murder of Lt. Richard W. Collins III with The Barn author Wright Thompson and mother of Lt. Collins, Dawn Collins. Moderated by Sociology Professor Rashawn Ray, this conversation will discuss how echoes of our country’s lynching past create shadows of racial violence in the present. We hope this dialogue will elicit a reckoning that contributes to healing and the pursuit of social justice.

Wright Thompson will begin by discussing The Barn, his deeply reflective work that examines family legacies, memory, and the spaces that connect past and present. Following this, Thompson will engage in a profound dialogue with Mrs. Dawn Collins, whose son, Lt. Richard Collins III, was tragically killed in an act of modern-day racial violence. Together, they will reflect on the enduring legacy of historic lynching and its modern-day manifestations in the United States, highlighting how past injustices continue to reverberate in contemporary society.

Learn more and register here.

2025 Research Update

2nd Annual Research UpdateOn February 21st, 2025, The 1856 Project will hold its second Annual Research Update, during which the project's second research report will be discussed. The 1856 Project investigates the University of Maryland’s connection to the regional context of slavery. It is the local chapter of Universities Studying Slavery (USS), a multi-institutional and international consortium of colleges and universities encouraging their institutions to think about their connections to slavery and the slave trade while addressing historical and contemporary issues surrounding race and inequality in higher education. The second annual presentation of findings will provide a research update based on historical information uncovered in 2024 by The 1856 Project members, a BSOS Summer Research Initiatives participant, a Fall 2024 semester Graduate Assistant, and community historians.

February 21, 2025 
In-person and Virtual via Zoom
3pm–5pm ET
Stamp Student Union, Grand Ballroom Lounge (Room 1209)

Learn more and register.

Black History Month Open Mic & Storytelling at the Language House

Black History Month Open Mic & Storytelling at the Language House

Thursday, February 20, 2025 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
St Mary’s Hall, Multipurpose Room

Join us in St. Mary's Hall for a multicultural evening of poetry and storytelling from cultures of the Black Diaspora from around the world. All are welcome to come and share a poem, story, text or other creative work by authors of the diaspora, in English or another language.

Learn more here.

Abolishing Racism: Creating a Future without Race

In a world where the concept of “race” continues to permeate our societies and shape our perceptions, the need for a radical shift in our approach to combating racism has never been more evident. The “Abolishing Racism: Creating a Future without Race” conference is a groundbreaking event that brings together a diverse range of speakers, scholars, artists, and activists who advocate for racial eliminativism — the bold belief that to truly end racism, we must dismantle the very notion of “race” itself.

event flyer

Learn more and RSVP here.