Corey D. B. Walker to Speak at William & Mary
In celebration of Homecoming 2013
Africana Studies presents
The 2013 Mellon Distinguished Lecture
“The Challenge of Blackness”: Africana Studies and the Imagination of Matter
By Dr. Corey D. B. Walker,
Ph.D. American Studies, Class of 2001
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences and John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities, Winston-Salem State University
October 18, Friday at 2pm, York Room, Sadler Center
This lecture revisits an inaugural scene in the long history of Africana Studies in order to elaborate the conditions of possibility for a renewed Africana Studies project in light of contemporary flows of knowledge and power in the American academy. Specifically, I will take up and extend Lerone Bennett Jr.’s proposition detailed in his 1969 Black Studies director’s seminar presentation at the Institute of the Black World in dialogue with the work of Charles H. Long to illuminate how and in what ways students and scholars in Africana Studies may establish key theoretical coordinates for elaborating new avenues of critical thinking and radical humanism in the world
Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University. Prior his Deanship, Dean Walker was Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of The Freemasonry of the Race: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America and Between Transcendence and History: An Essay on Religion and the Future of Democracy in America. Walker graduated from Norfolk State University with a B.S. degree in finance. After a career in the financial services industry, he went on to earn his M.Div. from the Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University, M.T.S. from the Divinity School, Harvard University, M.A., ad eundem, from Brown University and Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.
