2017 National Humanities Conference

Tom Rudin is the director of the Board on Higher Education and Workforce at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Prior to joining the Academies, Rudin served as senior vice president for career readiness and senior vice president for advocacy, government relations, and development at the College Board and was a policy analyst at the National Institutes of Health.

Ben Hurlbut is trained in the history of modern biomedical and life sciences and studies the changing relationship between science, politics, and law in the governance of biomedical research and innovation in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is an author of Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bioethics (Columbia University Press, 2017).

Judith Swift is the director of the Coastal Institute and professor of Communications Studies and Theatre at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focus is the translation of science to the public and she often employs the arts as a means to translate science. Among her recent works is, “It’s A Shore Thing,” a cabaret on adaptive management of coastal ecosystems.

Angel David Nieves, Ph.D. is an associate professor and co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College. Nieves’s scholarly work and community-based activism critically engage with issues of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South, and he is currently completing a manuscript entitled, “An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South”, with the University of Rochester Press.

Craig Steven Wilder is a historian of American institutions and ideas and author of several books, including his most recent. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), which Kirkus Reviews named one of the best nonfiction books of the year. Professor Wilder is also a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, has advised and appeared in several historical documentaries, including Ken Burns’ “Race Man,” (2016).

Jon Parrish Peede is Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His previous positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, literature grants director at the NEA, counselor to NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, director of the NEA Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience program, director of the NEA Big Read program, director of communications at Millsaps College, founding editor of Millsaps Magazine, and editor at Mercer University Press.

Marty Blatt is the director of the Public History Program, Northeastern University, is on the Board of the Northeastern University Humanities Center and has served on the board of MA Humanities. Additionally, he is a curator for the exhibit, Long Road to Justice, an exploration of the history of African Americans and the courts in Massachusetts, and principal organizer of the 2013 historical pageant, Roots of Liberty – the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War.

Diane O’Donoghue is the director of the Program for Public Humanities and is the senior fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. As an art historian (PhD Harvard), she specializes in Chinese visual culture as well as theories of memory and forgetting, and the relationships between constructions of psychology and material culture; her writings in these areas have been awarded the CORST and Deutsch Prizes.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge’s work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature and Innovation Collaborative. She worked as a historian for Boston African American National Historical Site, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006). Her forthcoming book is a biography of African-American activist, William Monroe Trotter, which explores the history of racial thought and African American political radicalism in New England at the turn of the century.

Kendra Field is assistant professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of the forthcoming book, “Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War” (Yale University Press, January 2018). Field has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” (2013) and “Roots: A History Revealed” (2016). Field holds a Ph.D. in American History from New York University.

Susan Chinsen is a community connector who focuses on the Asian Pacific Islander American community–using arts and culture for community building. For the past four years she has served as the Managing Director of the Chinese Historical Society of New England, she is the establishing director of the Boston Asian American Film Festival and is consulting with the Center for Asian American Media on the upcoming PBS documentary “The Chinese Exclusion Act.” She’s been recognized by YW Boston’s 150 Women of Influence.

What can we learn about Henry Thoreau by seeing the objects that surrounded him, the Journal in which he recorded and reflected on his observations, and the landscapes which served as both laboratory and sanctuary to this writer? What understandings about Thoreau come best from an immersion in the places that inspired him? What recent scholarship connecting Thoreau to the physical world has led to new insights about and interpretations of Thoreau’s life and work? We will investigate these questions as we “saunter” in his hometown in the 200th year of his birth. Registration is required.

Cost: $75 per person

Join fellow colleagues on a narrated tour of Boston Harbor and the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. Bruce Berman, director of strategy and communications at the Save the Harbor/Save the Bay will be the tour leader, which will include storytelling and songs of the sea. Berman will be accompanied a costumed pirate, who will share stories from the Age of Sail and lead willing participants in the historic sea chantey “Haul Away Joe”, as the tour winds around the Rowes Wharf through to the North End and Charlestown neighborhoods before going out to the East Boston shoreline. Registration is required. Kids welcome.

Cost: $35 per person

Explore Boston’s Black Heritage Trail in a tour led by L’Merchie Frazier, Museum of African American History director of education and interpretation. The tour begins at Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ famous memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment across from the African American Meeting House. A National Park Service Ranger will then guide the tour through sites of Boston’s abolitionist movement ending at the museum where participants can view the current exhibit, Picturing Frederick Douglass. John Stauffer, Harvard professor, Douglass scholar, and co-author of the book that inspired the exhibit, will join participants for a gallery talk.

Cost: $35 per person

Attend a public humanities program hosted by Mass Humanities and featuring a screening of Doug Blackmon’s documentary, “The Harvest” at Hibernian Hall. Blackmon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name, will discuss themes from the film with Farah Stockman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Boston Globe, and a few residents directly affected by the 1974 court order to desegregate public schools through busing. This event is part of Mass Humanities’ Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires activities.

Join Ben Hurlbut, Judith Swift, and Angel Nieves as they unpack the role of the humanities in gene editing, climate change and immigration. Moderated by Tom Rudin, this panel will explore the intersections between STEM research, global challenges, and humanities education.

The first-ever conference “dine around” encourages attendees to sign up for Friday night group dinners at various restaurants, all walking distance from Converse Hall, where the Capps Lecture will take place. What better way to meet new people, interact with colleagues, or continue conversations following the Schwartz Prize and Capps Lecture? Would you like to lead a dinner discussion? Send your name and topic to Ashley Cherry at acherry@statehumanities.org by September 15th. More information click here.

Celebrate the beginning of the Federation’s 40th anniversary with us at this year’s hospitality suite – a milestone made possible by the members, alumni, partners, and supporters that work in and for the public humanities! We look forward to honoring our shared history and celebrating the importance of the public humanities together. Thank you for all that you do!