Food for Thought: Learning for a Change: Social Justice, Racial Reckoning, and the Liberal Arts

As part of the College’s special programming for our ‘Celebrating Alumni Contributions – 200+ years of impact’ initiative, the College of Arts and Sciences’ Food for Thought livestreaming series serves as an opportunity for alumni and friends to hear from faculty experts, explore topics of interest, and stay connected with IU and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Our January 13, 2021 livestream featured a discussion with Professor Michelle Moyd (History + CRRES), Professor Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (History + Gender Studies), and Dr. Maisha Wester (American Studies) about the United States’ multidimensional histories of ongoing racist violence, injustice, and economic disparities, and the role of the liberal arts in making a better world. Following their conversation, our speakers were joined by IU College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion Vivian N. Halloran for a moderated Q&A session.

Presentation Description:
In 2020, the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others fueled a greater public consciousness of the United States’ continuing failure to reckon with its multidimensional histories of ongoing racist violence, injustice, and economic disparities. COVID-19 also spotlighted the racist structures that deny justice and equity to marginalized populations. This panel brings together three humanities scholars to share their research perspectives on how we got here, positing liberal arts education as essential to making a better world.

Speaker Biographies:
Michelle Moyd is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in the history of East Africa, especially its histories of warfare, violence, and soldiering during the German colonial period. She teaches African history and the global history of World War I. Her book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, was published by Ohio University Press in 2014. She is also the Associate Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES).

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Myers earned her doctorate in US History from Rutgers University and specializes in Black Women’s History in the Slave South. A committed activist, Myers is regularly interviewed by the media on issues of racial justice and has published editorials and articles on anti-Blackness and policing. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published in 2011. She is finishing work on her second book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.

Dr. Maisha Wester is an Associate Professor in American Studies at Indiana University. Her work examines racial representations in horror films, and appropriations of Gothic literary tropes in racial discourses. She is the author of African American Gothic: Screams From Shadowed Places (Palgrave) and Voodoo Queens and Zombie Lords: Haiti in US Horror Film (Wales UP, forthcoming). She is currently on leave as a British Academy Global Professor at the University of Sheffield.

Moderator Biography:
Vivian N. Halloran is a Professor of English and serves as Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, and postmodernism. Halloran is the author of The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel As Museum (U of Virginia Press, 2009). She’s currently finishing a third monograph, Caribbean American Belonging for Ohio State University Press.