The 28th Annual Black Women's Conference, "Excavating the Lives of Black Women," will take place virtually on March 24, 2023. The conference is sponsored by the Department of African American and African Studies and the Commonwealth Institute of Black Studies. Full details below for Friday’s conference and Saturday’s community volunteer event; please circulate the information and attached flyer.
Schedule of events:
Friday, March 24, 2023
10 a.m. | Black Feminist Archaeology. Panel with Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste & Dr. Ayana Omilade Flewellen, moderated by Dr. Elena Sesma | Register Here
2 p.m. | Keynote with Dr. Afua Cooper, “Mary Miles Bibb: Transnational Teacher, Abolitionist, and Publisher in the Age of Slavery and Freedom” | Register Here
Saturday, March 25, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. | Cemetery clean-up at African Cemetery No. 2. (419 E 7th Street, Lexington)
Community volunteer event will assist with headstone cleaning and minor landscape clearing in this historic cemetery. A brief tour of the cemetery, including a focus on the graves of notable women buried in the cemetery who contributed locally to the thoroughbred industry, social safety nets, education, and politics.
Parking is in the cemetery itself. Participants should drive in through either of the two gates and park far enough to one side to leave a driving lane. We will assemble at the center garden.
About our speakers:
Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. A native of the Bronx, New York, Dr. Battle-Baptiste is an activist-scholar who sees the classroom and campus as a space to engage contemporary issues with a sensibility of the past. Her academic training is in history and historical archaeology. Her research critically engages the interconnectedness of race, gender, class, and sexuality through an archaeological lens. Her research sites include Andrew Jackson's Hermitage Plantation, the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill in Boston, the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite (or House of the Black Burghardts) in Great Barrington, MA, and a community-based heritage site at Millars Plantation, on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. Her books include, Black Feminist Archaeology (2011), W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (2018), co-edited with Britt Rusert. In her spare time, she is completing a second edition of Black Feminist Archaeology and an edited volume on new directions of research about the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois with Dr. Richard Benson. In 2021 she became the President-elect of the American Anthropological Association; she will become President of the organization in 2023.
Dr. Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar, and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen's intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct, and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS, and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.
Dr. Afua Cooper Afua Cooper is a Professor in Dalhousie University’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (Halifax, Canada) with cross-appointments in the Department of History and Gender and Women Studies in Halifax. Her research interests are African Canadian studies, with specific regard to the period of enslavement and emancipation in 18th and 19th century Canada and the Black Atlantic; African-Nova Scotian history; political consciousness; community building and culture; slavery’s aftermath; Black youth studies. She chairs the Scholarly Panel on Lord Dalhousie’s Relationship to Race and Slavery, founded and chairs the Black Canadian Studies Association, and served as the seventh poet laureate of Halifax, Canada. Dr. Cooper is an award-winning, multidisciplinary scholar and artist and has curated several museum exhibits, serves as Canada’s representative on the UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Slave Routes Project, and has published numerous novels, books of poetry, and the ground-breaking book on Canadian slavery, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Slavery in Canada and the Burning of Old Montreal.