Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.  During her twenty-six years at Rutgers, she has not only been a teacher but the codirector of "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1997-99), a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (1999-2000), and chair of the history department (2000-03).

In November 2015, Rutgers University's Chancellor Edwards created the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History and named White as Chair. The Committee traced the university’s early history and its relationship with local African-American and Native-American communities.With active participation from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, staff, local historians, and librarians, the committee has conducted painstaking research to reexamine the university’s roots, including locating and studying the wills of Rutgers’ founders and benefactors and other archived documents. The result was the Scarlet and Black Project, which has produced two volumes related to Black and Native people's interaction with the university.

Professor White is the author of Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985). A second edition, with a new introduction and additional chapter, was issued in 1999. In anticipation of its anniversary, the Southern Historical Association celebrated it at its 2003 conference; and in 2005 a conference entitled "Slave Women's Lives: Twenty Years of 'Ar'n't I A Woman?' and More" was held at the Huntington Institute in California, with the proceedings published in the 2007 Winter issue of the Journal of African American Studies; the papers presented in honor of it at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women were published in the Journal of Women's History in July 2007.

Her other monographs are Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804-1860 (Oxford UP, 1996) and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (Norton, 1999). Professor Gray White contributed a number of articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Family History, and Journal of African American History. She is also the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women Historian in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and, with Darlene Clark Hine and others, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford UP, 2004). She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and the National Research Council / Ford Foundation.

Selected Publications

• Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2008)
• Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)
• Let My People Go: African American 1800-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999 [2nd ed])

In progress:

“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.

To register for free: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/kentucky-law-journal-annual-symposium-tickets-71975006181

Schedule:  https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:c9245a1…

Michael W. Twitty is a recognized culinary historian and independent scholar focusing on historic African American food and folk culture and culinary traditions of historic Africa and her Diaspora. He is a living history interpreter and historic chef, one of the few recognized international experts of his craft— the re-construction of early Southern cuisine as prepared by enslaved African American cooks for tables high and low—from heirloom seeds and heritage breed animals to fish, game, and foraged plant foods to historic cooking methods to the table. He is webmaster of www.Afroculinaria.com, the first website/blog devoted to the preservation of historic African American foods and foodways. He has conducted over 200 classes and workshops, written curricula and educational programs, giving lectures and performed cooking demonstrations for over 100 groups including the Smithsonian Institution, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Carnegie-Mellon, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Library of Congress, the Association for the Study of Food and Society and Oxford University's Symposium on Food and Cookery. He has been profiled in the Washington Pos and Washington Post Magazine, the New York Times, Grist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cuisine Noir, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Jet Magazine, Ebony.com and other periodicals. He has also been interviewed multiple times on NPR including the acclaimed food program The Splendid Table and Poppy Tooker’s Louisiana Eats and has been interviewed by the BBC. In 2013, he made several major appearances on television connected to his work including Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, PBS’ Time Team America, and Many Rivers to Cross with Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

As a part of his work as a culinary preservationist, he curated the first collection of African American heritage seeds through D. Landreth Seed Company for their bicentennial which proved to be wildly popular. Because of his work in the field, he was labeled “One of Five Food Writers to Watch in 2012,” by the Chicago Tribune. In 2013, First We Feast honored him in their list of the “20 Greatest (American) Food Bloggers of All Time.” His work includes substantial activism in the fields of social justice, food and culinary justice, environmental awareness, intergroup peace work and racial reconciliation.

In the field of culinary history, Mr. Twitty’s work has been included in a number of volumes. Most recently he contributed an sidebar essay in vegan chef Bryant Terry’s upcoming cookbook, a recipe to Louisiana Eats by Poppy Tooker, and five articles to the recently published Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink. He also contributed eighteen articles to Greenwood Press’ seminal encyclopedia, World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States, an article for the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Entertaining, and a lengthy biographical essay in their one volume reference work Icons of American Cooking. He was invited to participate in the 2010 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and the paper presented there was included in the published work based on the symposium. He authored the anchor essay on the African roots of rice and bean dishes in Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places as well as several recipes and essays in America I AM: Pass it Down Cookbook. His work in tracing heirloom vegetables from Africa to America has been profiled in several works including Chasing Chilies: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail among other works. As a freelance writer, his work has been published in Edible Chesapeake, The Tiller, The Jewish Forward, Eatocracy on CNN.com, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Journal of Negro History and Repast, the scholarly journal of the culinary historians of Ann Arbor, among others.

In addition to work published by others, he is also the author of a considerable volume of selfpublished work, beginning with Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders 1634- 1864, tracing the foodways of enslaved Marylanders from historic West and Central Africa through to the end of the Civil War. The work has been successfully sold independently and through retailers including Colonial Williamsburg, D. Landreth Seed Company, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and other outlets. His blog, Afroculinaria.com sustained over two and a half years with 250 posts, has attracted over half a million visitors and garnered a following of over 1500 subscribers, over 3,500 Twitter followers and a Facebook fan base of over 7300 to date. He actively maintains a social media presence and press lists to attract and sustain a ready audience for his presentations, published works and understands well the viral and popular marketing key to increasing sales and engagement. Most recently, his nationally recognized project, The Cooking Gene, successfully garnered the support of over 100 backers on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, raising over $8,000 to fully fund his effort to document the link between his family’s origins in West and Central Africa through their arrival in the colonial and antebellum South using culinary history and DNA research. He has been awarded two grants from the Montgomery County Arts and Humanities Council, including a FY 2014 grant to continue The Cooking Gene project.

Mr. Twitty has obtained significant experience in promoting and expounding on his work. The Cooking Gene Project, book signings, and inclusion in the Maryland Humanities Council’s Speaker’s Bureau for over 6 years speak to his tested ability to market and publicly represent his brand.

While the role of social media has been feverishly debated in fomenting, planning, and sustaining revolutions since twitter was first hailed—somewhat exaggeratedly—as a revolutionary technology in Moldova in 2009 and YouTube became a people's archive for election protests in Tehran during the summer of that same year, it seems incontestable that broadcast media (often singular, uni-directional, and hierarchical) are being supplanted by decentralized, multi-directional "public utterances" from social media. The result is a significantly more adaptable, amorphous, global, but also ephemeral public sphere. However, even with the best intentions, social media can amplify misinformation on a global scale, creating an echo chamber of falsehoods that are easily accepted as truths by virtue of their sheer repetition.  And more ominously, social media can be tracked and used to squelch the very voices that use it.  In this talk, Todd Presner will discuss a series of projects that analyze the role of social media in the Middle East, starting with the 2009 Tehran election protests and going up to the 2011 "Arab Spring," including twitter projects such as the "Voices of January 25th" (Egypt), "Voices of February 17th" (Libya), and HyperCities as examples. 

Todd Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of California Los Angeles.  He is the Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program and also the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. With Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp, he is the co-author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012). His most recent book is HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014), with collaborators David Shepard and Yoh Kawano. Projects can be seen at this website: http://thebook.hypercities.com.

A reception will follow the program in the Alumni Gallery.