Loyola’s 2021 Humanities Symposium to reflect on race, resistance, and resilience
Loyola University Maryland’s Center for the Humanities will host its annual Humanities Symposium on Thursday, March 11, at 7 p.m. via Zoom. Antoinette Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of Anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa and director of the USF Heritage Research Lab, will give the keynote address, "Lessons within Reach: The Space Between Truth, Social Justice, and What it Means ‘to be Maligned’."
During the event, Dr. Jackson will address her experience with the Boot Hill Cemetery Project that inspired Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and this year’s Symposium text, The Nickel Boys. The virtual event will also include a multimedia presentation and a Q&A session.
Dr. Jackson, who has completed many research projects with undergraduate and graduate students in the United States and Caribbean, earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She holds an MBA from Xavier University in Cincinnati and a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from the Ohio State University.
She recently received a USF-funded research grant focused on understanding and addressing blackness and anti-black racism for her project, “African American Burial Grounds & Remembering Project–Living Communities Challenging Silenced Histories in Florida.” The project focuses on activities to identify, interpret, preserve, and record unmarked, previously erased, and underserved African American burial grounds.
Dr. Jackson, whose work on heritage has been widely published, is the editor of the journal Present Pasts and the author of Speaking for the Enslaved—Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites (Routledge, 2012), and Heritage, Tourism, and Race—the Other Side of Leisure (Routledge, 2020).
Loyola faculty are encouraged to invite their students to attend the virtual event and virtual colloquia discussions on The Nickel Boys on Wednesday, March 10, and Thursday, March 11.
The Humanities Symposium is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.loyola.edu/symposium.