Faculty
Notes
New
Members
| Margaret
Garner Workshop
|
Conferences
New
Members
In Fall 2003, Tiffany N. Hinton (hintont@nku.edu)
joined the Institute for Freedom Studies as a faculty member in
the Literature and Language Department, where she has taught since
2002. Before coming to NKU, Ms. Hinton directed the Writing Center
at the College of Mount St. Joseph and taught as an adjunct instructor
at the University of Cincinnati, her alma mater. The Cincinnati
native is a doctoral candidate in Africana Literature and Cultural
Studies at the University of Florida, where she served as a McKnight
Doctoral Fellow. She holds an M.A. from Florida State University.
Ms. Hinton served as writer/editor of the recently released IFS
Report, a 15-page publication that highlights IFS's many accomplishments
in its first two years of operation. Her primary responsibility
with IFS involves work that connects the Underground Railroad Movement
to the fields of Literature and Cultural Studies. Toward that end,
in Spring 2005 Ms. Hinton will teach "Neo Compared to What?"
a new course comparing such classic fugitive slave narratives as
Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with
such contemporary neo-slave narratives as Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.
In
Fall 2004, the Institute for Freedom Studies welcomed its newest
faculty member, the Music Department’s Erwin Stuckey
(stuckeye@nku.edu).
A native of Cincinnati, Mr. Stuckey is a graduate of the College
Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati; in fact,
he is its first African American musician to earn a Masters Degree
in jazz performance. Moreover, his ongoing education derives from
decades of personal research into aural and written transcriptions
of black music, ranging from spirituals, jazz, blues, gospel, funk,
rap, Afro-Brazilian samba, and Afro-Cuban salsa. To culminate his
research in the music of the Underground Railroad, Mr. Stuckey recently
completed an eight-movement contemporary dance suite titled Clara’s
Suite Escape. He is excited to premier the work in Spring 2005.
Mr. Stuckey is a national performer whose soon-to-be-released discography
will include 30 recordings. Locally, he can be heard each week at
Chez Nora restaurant and jazz club in Covington, Kentucky. Mr. Stuckey
has taught jazz studies at his alma mater as well as at Central
State University and Xavier University. He also spent a total of
10 years teaching music in Greater Cincinnati public schools. When
not teaching, performing, composing and visiting his parents, Ulysses
and Emma Stuckey, he oversees music duties at the Solid Rock Baptist
Fellowship with Pastor John Davis III.
Dr. Christopher Wilkey’s (wilkeyc@nku.edu)
work as an Institute for Freedom Studies Associate began in Fall
2003, with his post as an assistant professor in the Department
of Literature and Language. Dr. Wilkey received his PhD. in English
from Wayne State University in Detroit, with a specialization in
rhetoric and composition. His teaching and research focuses on the
social and political dimensions of language use and literacy education.
Committed to linking much of his professional work to the work of
social justice, Dr. Wilkey hopes to create writing courses and research
projects that forcefully speak to issues of race, class, and freedom
and attend to the social needs of local communities outside the
university.
Margaret
Garner
Workshop
When it premieres in July, 2005, Cincinnati Opera’s Margaret
Garner will have benefited from the expertise of several Institute
for Freedom Studies’ Faculty Associates. On August 28-29, 2004,
Tiffany N. Hinton (hintont@nku.edu)
(Literature and Language), Delores Walters (waltersd@nku.edu)
(Sociology, Anthropology and Philosophy), and Kristine Yohe
(yohe@nku.edu) (Literature and Language)
joined the opera company’s artistic and administrative team
in Detroit, Michigan for a composer workshop. The Margaret Garner
workshop provided a critical opportunity for composer Richard Danielpour
and creative teams from each of the three co-commissioning opera companies
to work through the score, and begin to prepare the opera for design
and staging. Not only did the Institute for Freedom Studies’
Faculty Associates enjoy an orchestra reading of Act I and a piano/vocal
run-through of the entire opera but they also were called upon to
provide critical feedback on the work-in-progress. As well, each of
these faculty members is working with Cincinnati Opera to develop
public programs designed to highlight the actual history of Margaret
Garner, to raise awareness about the Ohio River Valley region’s
significance to the Underground Railroad Movement, and to appeal to
non-traditional audiences of opera.
Conferences
Frederick
Douglass and Herman Melville:
A
Sesquicentennial Celebration, June 2005
New Bedford , Massachusetts
New Bedford, Massachusetts, is the city in which Frederick Douglass
settled after escaping from slavery in 1838. It is also the city from
which Herman Melville sailed on the 1841 whaling voyage that was to
result in Moby-Dick (1851). From June 22-26, 2005, the New
Bedford Whaling Museum will be the site of the first academic conference
devoted to the lives and works of both Douglass (1818-1895) and Melville
(1819-1891). The conference will examine the works, lives, and contexts
of these two prodigious, encyclopedic writers whose works spanned
most of the nineteenth century. We are holding the conference in 2005
in order to celebrate the 150th Anniversaries of Douglass’ My
Bondage and My Freedom and Melville’s Benito Cereno,
two of the most powerful indictments of enslavement and racism in
American literature.
Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: A Sesquicentennial Celebration
will feature three keynote speakers: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Sterling
Stuckey, and Eric Sundquist. Program Chairs Samuel Otter and Robert
Levine are currently putting together some thirty paper-reading sessions
and discussion panels from the wealth of submissions received by our
June 15, 2004 deadline. These sessions and panels will examine issues
of authorship, gender, audience, race, politics, travel, rhetoric,
and aesthetics. A variety of performance activities are already scheduled.
They include a poetry reading by Michael Harper, Christopher Moore’s
performance of his one-man Moby-Dick, and impersonators of
both Douglass and Melville. The New Bedford Whaling Museum will mount
an exhibition entitled Douglass and Melville: Our Bondage and
Our Freedom, and other New Bedford museums will offer related
exhibitions. Tours of New Bedford sites relating to both Douglass
and Melville will be offered. The conference coordinator is Robert
K. Wallace (wallacer@nku.edu)
of Northern Kentucky University. Additional information about the
conference may be found at the New Bedford Whaling Museum website
http://whalingmuseum.org.
Gendered
Resistance: Women Opposing Sexual and Economic Subjugation
in
Global,
Historical and Contemporary Contexts, October 7-8, 2005
Miami
University, Oxford, Ohio
The above-named McClellan Symposium is part of Miami University’s
"Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality: The Power of Intersectionality"
conference in Oxford, OH. This conference draws local, regional and
national participants and includes two keynote addresses by well-known
scholars. The symposium participants will focus on the topic of women-centered
forms of resistance to enslavement, particularly sexual bondage, rape
and other forms of sexual violation and exploitation in both modern-day
and historical contexts. Scholars and activists will examine gender-specific
opposition strategies from a cultural, social, economic, psychological
and/or health-related standpoint and frame their research within a
global, historical context. A book publication of symposium papers
is planned.
Writer/actress, filmmaker, S. Pearl Sharp, will screen and discuss
her new documentary film The Healing Passage/Voices From The Water,
which explores present-day residuals of slavery and the trans-Atlantic
slave trade. The McClellan Symposium will conclude with a tour of
the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Symposium organizers
are Delores M. Walters (walters@nku.edu),
IFS, Sociology, Anthropology & Philosophy Dept. at NKU and the
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and Mary E. Frederickson,
History Dept., Miami University.
Toni
Morrison and Sites of Memory Fourth Biennial Conference of the Toni
Morrison
Society, July 14-17, 2005
Cincinnati, Ohio
and Highland Heights, Kentucky
Call
for Papers
Abstracts are invited for papers that seek to describe and interpret
sites of memory as cultural locations, persons, artifacts, expressions,
and as creative constructions in Toni Morrison’s fiction. Particular
attention will be given to those papers that address the sites of
memory in Beloved, but papers on all of the works, employing a variety
of approaches, will be considered. A special session will be devoted
to the usefulness of sites of memory in teaching Morrison’s
novels.
Abstracts should be no more than one page in length and should be
submitted by February 1, 2005.
Please submit abstracts to:
Dr. Kristine Yohe
Fourth Biennial Conference Director
Department of Literature and Language
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, Kentucky 41099
The Fourth Biennial Conference will include:
Cincinnati Opera Premiere of Margaret Garner. Librettist,
Toni Morrison;
Composer, Richard Danielpour;
Lead, Denyce Graves
Tour of farm where Margaret Garner worked & sites on the Underground
Railroad
Tour of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Teacher Workshops
Keynote Speakers
Concurrent Sessions of Scholarly Panels
Authors’ and Editors’ Luncheon
Society Banquet
For more information, please contact Kristine Yohe
(yohe@nku.edu) or visit
www.gsu.edu/tms
Back to the Top
