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.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 11:00 am - 7:30 pmGet 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!
Join 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.
On 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)
Juno Award-winning Afro-Cuban group Okan, led by singer-songwriters Elizabeth Rodriguez on violin and Magdelys Savigne on percussion, will perform at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Thursday, February 20 at 8pm.
Learn more and buy tickets here
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.
Join us for a lecture by scholar and writer Dr. Nikki Greene as she discusses her recent book, "Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art" which examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture.
A tea will be hosted at 4 PM, and the lecture will start at 5 PM in the gallery.
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.
This BlaQ History Month, join the LGBTQ+ Equity Center for a book talk with Saeed Jones on Wednesday, February 19th, from 5:00-6:15pm in the Ulrich Theater in Tawes Hall. Jones is a black queer author whose award winning novel, How We Fight for Our Lives, is a coming of age story that centers a young black man who navigates growing up in the Southern United States.
Friday, February 14, 2025 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Parren J. Mitchell Art/Sociology Building, 4213A Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture
One of this nation's great thinkers and speakers, Frederick Douglass was enslaved from birth on the eastern shore of Maryland, After self-emancipation, he became a leader of abolitionists and an advisor to President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass never knew his birthday, so he chose as his birthday the day of love, Valentine's Day, February 14th.
This Valentine's Day, Friday, February 14th, join members of the campus community and beyond in the Collaboratory as we celebrate Douglass Day with a transcribe-a-thon featuring the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress. There will be all sorts of goodies, including a birthday cake to celebrate Frederick Douglass's birthday, and we'll connect to the larger community of fellow transcribers across the nation.
Thursday, February 13, 2025 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
St Mary’s Hall, Multipurpose Room
Join us in the Multipurpose Room on the ground floor of St. Mary's Hall for a talk and Q&A discussion with UMD Professor Rachel Schine (SLLC-Arabic, History) about her new book in honor of Black History Month. Professor Schine's book, "Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race," was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
In "Black Knights" Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.
Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
Celebrate Black History Month by joining UMD Libraries for our annual Black History Month Read-a-thon in McKeldin’s Portico Room. Readers from across the libraries will share excerpts from books that center Black voices, experiences, and imagination. Light refreshments will be offered. This event will also be streamed on the UMD Libraries’ Youtube.
