UB Humanities Conference to focus on Black studies

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Few people have done more in the last 50 years to develop and advance the discipline of Black studies and African American literature than Deborah McDowell, PhD, Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virgina.

Rinaldo Walcott, PhD, professor and chair of Africana and American Studies in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, calls McDowell one of recent history’s most important Black literary feminists and the perfect choice to deliver the keynote address at the UB Humanities Conference, scheduled for March 12-14 and titled “Black Studies and the Crises of Our Times.”

The three-day conference, presented by the university’s Humanities Institute, opens on March 12 with a reception in the Center for the Arts Screening Room on the university’s North Campus at 5 p.m., followed by McDowell’s address at 5:45 p.m.

Conference events continue on March 13 and 14 with all talks, panels and discussions happening in the Landmark Room, 210 Student Union, also on the university’s North Campus.

The conference is free and open to the public, but guests must register to attend.

McDowell has worked extensively to recover and bring back into print the literary work of Black women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has served in editorial roles for the “Norton Anthology of African American Literature” and the highly respected anthology “Slavery and the Literary Imagination.” She has also written widely and contributed influential books, articles and essays over the course of a distinguished career that has seen McDowell emerge as a leading figure of Black feminist critical theory.

“Professor McDowell is a visionary who has been central to the development and advancement of Black studies,” says Walcott, an expert in Black diaspora cultural studies and the conference organizer. “It’s an honor to have her offer keynote remarks at this year’s annual conference.”

Walcott says that one account of Black studies understands it as emerging from crises produced when Black people demanded full citizenship rights in America, but he instead decided that the conference should focus on an alternate account that looks at how the field of Black studies helps us to think about what’s needed in the larger world.

“Regardless of where you might fall on the political spectrum, it’s clear that globally we seem to be moving from one crisis to another. Black thinkers who work within the intellectual and scholarly traditions of Black studies have important insights to share,” he says. “How Black people live through, make sense and respond to the crises that impact them helps to fulfill a broader set of political, social and cultural concerns that benefits everyone.”

The conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to discuss topics from public health, questions of violence, Black activism, literature and the role of the university.

“Black scholars have spent a long time developing a rich intellectual history of thinking through and about crises,” Walcott says. “By thinking alongside Black scholars -- which is what we’re inviting people to do -- the lives of all of us become much more illuminated.”

Walcott says he assembled such a varied panel to offer new ways of addressing universal problems. Within the individual areas of expertise of these researchers will come a collective and complex matrix of humanistic thinking that reveals how the humanities shape all areas of life.

“We’re going to have three days of conversations that will leave us energized and committed toward creating a world that we’ve been trying to make, and that we so desperately need.”