Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University, has been involved in multiple initiatives to bring academic voices and knowledge into public debates over race, policing, and violence. In August 2014 she created the hashtag #fergusonsyllabus in order to generate and share a crowdsourced syllabus about African American history, civil rights, and racialized policing.  Her work exemplifies the impact of a new generation of scholars who are using social media to ensure that insights from humanities scholarship can contribute to urgent public debate.

Dr. Chatelain is both a highly respected scholar—author most recently of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Duke University press, 2015)—and a creative public intellectual, working not only through social media but through means like her piece in The Atlantic, “How to Teach Kids About What's Happening in Ferguson” (Aug. 25, 2014). She is a model for graduate students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences who are searching for ways to bring activist and scholarly commitments together.

This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of History and Africana Studies and the Program in Cultural Studies together with the Humanities Center. For more information, contact Lara Putnam at lep12@pitt.edu.