Corrine Collins, "Delicious Multiraciality: Meghan Markle, Nara Smith, and Domestic (Re)Productivity"
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
David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora
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
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 11:00 am - 7:30 pm
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.
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.