Diversity in/and Higher Education
Diversity in/and Higher Education
Antiracism: Communities + Collaborations presents Diversity in/and Higher Education, featuring Patricia A. Matthew (Montclair State University), Christy Pichichero (George Mason University) and moderated by Julius Fleming, Jr. (University of Maryland). Co-sponsored by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative.
For UMD registrants: some copies of Matthew’s Written/Unwritten and Pichichero’s The Military Enlightenment are available. Please send your campus address to Prof. Tita Chico (tchico@umd.edu).
Bios
Patricia A. Matthew is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches courses about British Romanticism, the history of the novel, and British abolitionist literature. She is the co-editor with Miriam Wallace of a special issue of Romantic Pedagogy Commons and with Manu Chander, of a cluster issue in European Romantic Review. She has published essays and reviews in Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language and written about race, portraiture, and British abolitionist material culture for The Atlantic and Lapham’s Quarterly. Matthew is the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and has published essays and book reviews on diversity in higher education in PMLA, The College Language Association Journal, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and The New Inquiry. Her work on diversity and equity has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and on The Brian Lehrer Show. Her most recent publications include “Shondaland’s Regency: On Bridgerton” for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a chapter on Frankenstein, race, and Michael Brown in Bloomsbury’s Frankenstein in Theory (Ed. Orrin Wang). She is currently editing a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Blackness in the nineteenth century and writing a monograph about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist culture under advance contract with Princeton University Press. Matthew was a 2020-2021 Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University at Buffalo and is currently a visiting associate professor in the university’s English department.
Twitter @triciamatthew
Christy Pichichero is a public intellectual and Associate Professor of History and French at George Mason University. She earned her A.B. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, her B.M. in Applied Music (Voice - Opera) from the Eastman School of Music, and her Ph.D. in French Studies from Stanford University. She is the Director of Faculty Diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the President of the Western Society for French History, and a thought leader in Critical Race Theory, anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Dr. Pichichero runs workshops around the country on diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism. Her first book, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press, 2017; paperback, 2021), was a finalist for the Kenshur Book Prize for best book in eighteenth-century studies. Dr. Pichichero is currently working on two book-length research projects. The first engages theories of Critical Race Studies and Critical Mixed Race Studies to investigate intersectionality and processes of racialization in eighteenth-century Europe. Her second project focuses on war and humanism. Dr. Pichichero received the 2021 Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion.
Twitter @clpichichero
Julius B. Fleming, Jr. earned a doctorate in English, and a graduate certificate in Africana studies, from the University of Pennsylvania. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Professor Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled "Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom," under contract with New York University Press. This project reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre, while examining the importance of time and affect to the making of the modern racial order. Analyzing a largely unexplored, transnational archive of black theatre, it demonstrates how black artists and activists used theatre and performance to unsettle the demands of a violent racial project he terms “black patience.” From the slave castle to the hold of the slave ship, from the auction block to commands to “go slow” in fighting segregation, black people have historically been forced to wait, coerced into performing patience. This books argues that during the Civil Rights Movement, black people’s cries for “freedom now”--at the lunch counter, in the streets, and importantly on the theatrical stage--disturbed the historical praxis of using black patience to manufacture and preserve anti-blackness and white supremacy.
Twitter @juliusflemingjr
Follow the Conversation @UMDEnglish