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March 31, 2022
RECAP: “Thoughts on the World, the Political, and the Black,” Colloquium with Brown University Prof. Ainsley LeSure
Are politics inimical to Black life? That was the question that concluded the abstract for Brown University political theorist Ainsley LeSure’s March 18 talk at the Kinder Institute, which she began by placing her work in conversation with those in the field of Black Studies who would answer this question, ‘yes.’ At its core, the […]
March 18, 2022
RECAP: “Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy,” Colloquium with Brown University Historian Christopher Grasso
In the introduction to his 2021 biography of John R. Kelso, Brown University historian Christopher Grasso describes his subject as possessing Whitman-like multiplicity. As Prof. Grasso’s March 11 talk at the Kinder Institute made abundantly clear, as capacious as Whitman was, this introduction might still be an understatement. Born in a backwoods cabin in Southwest […]
March 1, 2022
RECAP: “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Ratification,” Colloquium w/ Prof. Anne Twitty
For at least a decade, the lecture to undergraduates has gone like this: In an age of constitutional innovation, Massachusetts provided the spark with the ratification of its 1780 state constitution; the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia happily appropriated this practice post-drafting; and from then on out, ratification was the American way. As […]
February 21, 2022
RECAP: African American Political Thought Roundtable
In discussing the overarching goal for the recently published African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), co-editor and University of Washington Associate Professor of Political Science Jack Turner III pointed to how the tradition in the field has long been to divide Black thinkers into taxonomies of ideology: feminism, Marxism, […]
February 8, 2022
RECAP: “Baseball, Law, and Society” Lock-In
With baseball locked out, and with Columbians locked in at home due to snow, a trio of presenters took to Zoom for the Friday, February 4 installment of the Colloquium Series to speak on the nation’s pastime, from its early days to its present state. “Unwritten Rules: Flood v. Kuhn at 50” “It is revolting […]
February 7, 2022
RECAP: “Ralph Ellison’s Repertoire of Agency,” Colloquium with KICD Postdoc Ferris Lupino
Since its publication in 1952, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has been a touchstone for political thinkers, who find in the novel a means—various means—of reckoning with racial impasse. This is as true now as ever, Kinder Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Ferris Lupino pointed out in setting up his January 28, semester-opening colloquium, with competing readings emerging […]