Join Dr. Afua Cooper for a presentation on the Lord Dalhousie Scholarly Panel on Slavery and Race, followed by conversation with Danni Ebanks-Ingram and Dr. Asha Rogers. Dr. Michell Chresfield will chair. The Report on Lord Dalhousie’s History on Slavery and Race, headed by historian and artist Dr. Afua Cooper, was submitted in 2019 at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. The panel looked into Lord Dalhousie’s views on race and put forward recommendations for how campus might be accountable for past and present connections to anti-Black racism. The University of Birmingham’s Centre for the Study of North America is delighted that Dr. Afua Cooper has accepted our invitation to tell us about the work of the panel she chaired, and engage in dialogue about that panel’s report and its resonance for universities and wider communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Chaired by Dr. Michell Chresfield, this event will begin with a presentation by Dr. Cooper on the Report, followed […]

January 29th and 30th, 2021, online via Zoom With keynote addresses by: Dr Phillip Gordon (author of Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond ) and Dr Julie Beth Napolin (author of The Facts of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form ) William Faulkner (1897-1962) has long been considered one of the foremost modernist authors to emerge from the United States. Faulkner’s authorial obsessions have typically been described as including time, history, and the fraught definition of “Southernness” in the aftermath of the Civil War, emancipation, and the quest for Civil Rights. However, starting with the publication of the edited volume Faulkner and Postmodernism (1997), critics have sought to recontextualise Faulkner as a “postmodernist” and even “transgressive” author, whose work explores the darker side of humanity and sets a precedent for writers including William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy to explore the nature of sexuality, racial identity, […]