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Conversations - Spring 2010
**All Conversations lectures are held at 4:00pm in Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension on the Columbia University Morningside Campus unless otherwise noted. ****************************************************************************** Professor Harry G. Levine received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. from Brandeis University. In recent years he has taught Introduction to Sociology, Drugs and Society, the History of Food, and Sociological Theory. Much of his research and writing has focused on drugs, alcohol and food in historical context. He has won awards for his writing about the history of addiction, about alcohol prohibition and regulation, and about crack cocaine and the war on drugs. In 2007 he won the Lindesmith Award for Distinguished Scholarship. His current research examines the epidemic of racially-biased marijuana arrests in the U.S and why, since 1997, New York City has arrested more people for possessing small amounts of marijuana than any city in the world. Friday, February 19th Mabel O. Wilson, Associate Professor in Architecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP, navigates her multidisciplinary practice between the fields of architecture, art, visual cultural analysis, and American studies. Her design research and scholarship investigates place and cultural memory in black America, race and visual culture, and new technologies and the social production of space. She is currently completing Progress and Prospects – Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums a book that studies how race, social uplift, and nationalism shaped black life through the ideological spheres of expositions and museums. Her collaborative design practices (KW: a and Studio 6Ten) have worked on speculative and built projects. Her practice has been a competition finalist for several important cultural institutions including lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground Memorial and the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture (with Diller Scofidio +Renfro.) She directs the GSAPP’s program for Advanced Architectural Research and the HBCU Design Leadership Project. She received a B.S in Architecture from the University of Virginia, a Master of Architecture from the GSAPP, and a Ph.D in American Studies from NYU. Friday, March 5th Tanya Greene has worked as a capital defense practitioner representing indigent clients for almost 15 years at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, as a Deputy Capital Defender at the New York Capital Defender Office, and as the Training and Assistance Counsel for the National Consortium for Capital Defense Training where she developed and implemented a unique and successful program of hands-on training for capital defense practitioners across the country. Tanya Greene is currently the Director of Domestic and Pro Bono Programs at Columbia Law School’s office of Social Justice Initiatives. Friday, March 26th "Robert A. Hill has been a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1977, before which he taught at Dartmouth College and Northwestern University. He moved to America from Jamaica in 1971 and was a senior fellow at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. He is the editor-in-chief of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (1983–), ten volumes of which have been published thus far by the University of California Press. He served as executive consultant to the making of the PBS-WGBH documentary film Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind for the American Experience series in 2001. He is also the editor of numerous historical editions, among them Marcus Garvey’s Black Man, Cyril Briggs’s Crusader, The FBI’s RACON, and George S. Schuyler’s Black Empire and Ethiopian Stories. In addition, he is the literary executor of the C. L. R. James Estate. In October 1992 he was awarded the Gold Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica for Distinguished Contribution to history." Friday, April 9th Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) from 2004-08, is one of the nation’s leading voices in civil rights. Shaw joined LDF in 1982 and in 2004 became the fifth person to lead the organization. While at LDF, he was lead counsel in a coalition that represented African-American and Latino students in the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions case. That case, Gratz v. Bollinger, went before the United States Supreme Court in 2003, along with Grutter v. Bollinger, which challenged the use of affirmative action at The University of Michigan Law School. Shaw worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1979-82, where he litigated civil rights cases at the trial and appellate levels and at the U.S. Supreme Court. He currently serves on the Legal Advisory Network of the European Roma Rights Council based in Budapest, Hungary. Shaw previously has taught at Columbia, University of Michigan, Temple and CUNY law schools. He is the recipient of the Wien Prize for Social Responsibility from Columbia Law School; the A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Memorial Award from the National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division; and the Baldwin Medal from the Wesleyan University alumni body. Friday, April 23rd Dr. Bradley’s research area is recent U.S. history with an emphasis on the African American experience. His research investigates the role that youths have played in shaping post-WWII American society. The research specifically focuses on the efforts and abilities of black college students to change not only their scholastic environments but also the communities that surrounded their institutions of higher learning. His most recent book deals with black students who risked their educations (and potentially their lives) during the famous controversy that took place at Columbia University in 1968-1969.
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IRAAS Conversations Lecture Series - Spring 2010