Frank Islam Athenaeum Symposia Speaker Series

Download event flyer for Keith Wilson  (PDF, ) 

"Fieldnotes: Race, Love, and Violence in the Melting Pot”, Keith Wilson

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, a Cave Canem fellow, and a graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. He has received three scholarships from Bread Loaf as well as scholarships from MacDowell, UCross, Millay Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.

Keith serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor at Obsidian Journal. Keith's first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2019. His work has appeared or is appearing in the following journals: Poetry, Adroit Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Little A, Narrative, 32 Poems, Rhino, Muzzle, Blueshift Journal, and Vinyl. Additionally, he won a Best of the Net Award, has been anthologized in Best New Poets, and was appointed a Gregory Djanikian Scholar. His nonfiction won a Redivider Blurred Genre prize.

Download event flyer for Marcy Norton (PDF, ) 

"Chocolate and the Flowery World: Indigenous Aesthetics and Colonial Appropriation", Marcy Norton

Marcy Norton is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and a former Guggenheim fellow (2016-2017). Her research explores the intersections of environment, embodiment, and colonialism, and these concerns have guided her work on the history of food, drugs, science and inter-species relationships in early modern Europe and Latin America.

She is the author of Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2008), winner of the best book prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. In addition to continued research on chocolate, she is currently finishing a book on human-animal relationships after 1492 in Europe and Native America.

Download event flyer for Alessandro Angelini  (PDF, ) 

“Model Favela: Imagination and Inequality in Brazil”, Alessandro Angelini

Alessandro Angelini is an assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He studies how building practices and cultural production shape political subjectivity in urban squatter settlements. His research in Brazil tracks how these environments become objects of material practice, technocratic knowledge, and artistic expression. His first book, Model Favela: Youth, Second
Nature, and Rio de Janeiro, based on four years of ethnographic research, investigates the social ordering of creativity as experienced and represented by working-class Afro-Brazilian youth. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Download event flyer for Lauren Bell  (PDF, ) 

“Not Just Politics As Usual: Making American Democracy Work in an Era of ‘Fake News’ and Hyperpartisanship”, Lauren Bell

Lauren C. Bell is Professor of Political Science and Dean of Academic Affairs at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia. She is a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow (1997-98) on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and a former United States Supreme Court fellow (2006-07) at the United States Sentencing Commission in Washington, DC.

Dr. Bell is the author of Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (Cambria Press, 2011), Warring Factions: Interest Groups, Money, and the New Politics of Senate Confirmation (The Ohio State University Press, 2002) and The U.S. Congress, A Simulation for Students (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005) as well as co-author of Slingshot: The Defeat of Eric Cantor (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015) and Perspectives on Political Communication: A Case Approach (Allyn & Bacon, 2008). In addition to these books, Bell has published single- and co-authored articles in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, The Journal of Legislative Studies, The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and Judicature; previously, she served on the editorial board of Justice System Journal.

Her work has also appeared in or been cited by The New York Times, Newsweek.com, The Washington Post, Roll Call, The National Journal, The Huffington Post, Foreign Affairs.com, Wisconsin Public Radio, Share Radio (London), the Canadian Press, the London School of Economics and Political Science’s American Politics and Policy Blog and The Richmond Times-Dispatch.