Anna Julia Cooper was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in History, taught and mentored scores of students in D.C., and made invaluable contributions to Black intellectual life. The Cooper Workshop will feature scholars from various disciplines researching and writing on Black history in the United States and the world. We use “Black” to embrace the expansiveness of African America and attend to the long tradition of black internationalism.  With the conviction that “all knowledge is incremental and collective,” as David Levering Lewis once wrote, the Workshop aims to foster a supportive space for the engagement and production of scholarship in African American history. As a works-in-progress series, we discuss pre-circulated, unpublished papers. Each session will include a response from a graduate student discussant.  

 

Five to six times per academic year, we will discuss a colleague's precirulcated paper. The Workshop draws an interdisciplinary community from the area with expertise in a wide reach of the field. Graduate students are at the heart of the community that the Cooper Workshop hopes to foster and, as such, are encouraged to attend Workshop events. Each session will feature a graduate student discussant who will deliver a brief response to the work-in-progress and initiate the open discussion to follow.

Papers will be circulated one week in advance of the workshop, which will meet on Fridays, from 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the University of Maryland, unless a special location is noted. The schedule for the academic year is below.

Fall 2019

October. 25, 4:30 p.m. Taliaferro Hall 2110.

Minkah Makalani, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin, “The Role of Artists in Caribbean Democracy”

November 22, 4:00 p.m. Taliaferro Hall 2110.

Psyche Williams Forson, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland, “Low Down Dirty Shame: Food Shaming and Food Policing in Black Communities”

Spring 2020

February 28, 4:30 p.m. Taliaferro Hall 2110.

Jessica Millward, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Irvine, "'Seemed to be one of those women': African American Women and Intimate Partner Violence in the Post Civil War South"

Tiffany Gill, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History, University of Delaware; "Retreat, but Don't Surrender: Civil Rights Activists and the Problem of Leisure."

April 24, 4:30 p.m. Taliaferro Hall 2110.

Christopher Freeburg, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, "When did We Become an Us: The Origins of Black Culture as an Idea during Slavery"

Stanley Maxson, doctoral candidate in the History department at UMD, will be the graduate student coordinator of The Cooper Workshop. If you have any questions, please feel free to email him (smaxson@terpmail.umd.edu [1]) or me (qtmills@umd.edu [2]).