Nell Irvin Painter, scholar and author of The History of White People, will deliver the 18th annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Convocation Address at Loyola University Maryland on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011. The event begins at 7 p.m. in McGuire Hall on Loyola’s North Charles Street campus.
“Nell Irvin Painter is one of our country’s most prolific and distinguished historians, and her books and articles provide extraordinary insights into the ways relationships among races, cultures, and genders have influenced the development of United States and the forces at play in American society today,” said Martha Wharton, Ph.D., assistant vice president for academic affairs and diversity at Loyola. “We are delighted to have a scholar of her caliber appear at our University.”
Painter’s most recent book, The History of White People, takes the reader on a journey through more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, examining the emergence of both the idea of race broadly and the frequent praise for “whiteness.”
The Edwards Professor of History Emerita at Princeton University, Painter directed the Program in African-American Studies at Princeton from 1997-2000. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in 1988, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Painter earned an M.A. at UCLA and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. She also studied at the University of Bordeaux and the University of Ghana.
Her earlier books include Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919, which won the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize; The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South; Creating Black Americans; and Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction.
Painter has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Bunting Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She was named president of the Southern Historical Association in 2007 and served as the president of the Organization of American Historians from 2007- 08. Retired from Princeton since 2005, Painter earned a BFA from Rutgers University in 2009 and is currently a graduate student in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Previous Martin Luther King, Jr., Convocation speakers include filmmaker Spike Lee, University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, singer Bernice Johnson Reagon, and writer Octavia Butler.
The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. For more information or to reserve your seat, visit www.loyola.edu/mlkconvocation or call 410-617-5757.
Free parking is available at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen with shuttle service to and from the University.
Persons with disabilities who may require special services should contact the office of disability support services at 410-617-2062 or (TDD) 410-617-2141 at least 48 hours prior to the event.
For more information or questions regarding this story, contact Media Relations Manager Nick Alexopulos at nalexopulos@loyola.edu or 410-617-5025.