Campbell Lecture Series to host Imani Perry in November

By Hongtao Hu     10/24/23 11:06pm

Imani Perry, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University and a MacArthur Fellow, will give two lectures at Rice for the Campbell Lecture Series at 6 p.m. Nov. 15 and 16.

The lectures are titled “For Oneself and One’s Own: Law, Citizenship, and African American History” and “On Trial: The Tradition of Black Testimony and Witness.” These lectures will be given in the Hudspeth Auditorium at the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies.

A fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and author of six books, Perry won a National Book Award in 2022 for her most recent book, “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.” Perry said her research for the lectures had been ongoing for many years.

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“I’m specifically interested in what kinds of ideas about what the law should be and do emerged from people who stood outside of the law,” Perry wrote in an email to the Thresher. “The most vulnerable have always had a more nuanced understanding of how law can be used to harm or protect, to facilitate or destroy.”

Dean of Humanities Kathleen Canning said the Campbell Lecture Series brings preeminent scholars and artists to Rice to tackle societal issues in the humanities.

“It’s not every day that Rice students have the chance to hear a lecture by a scholar of Imani Perry’s caliber and visibility, who has won one national prize after another very recently,” Canning wrote in an email to the Thresher. 

According to Lora Wildenthal, the director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, going to such one-or two-time lectures can be valuable.

“[Campbell Lectures get] people out of the inevitable limitations of the faculty who happen to be employed by Rice University at this moment, and whose classes happen to fit into the schedules of students,” Wildenthal said. “You can have a big intellectual experience with one event, you don’t have to commit to a whole semester.” 

Perry said she hopes the lectures will be of interest to students from fields including political science, history, English, philosophy and African American Studies. These lectures will draw upon poetry and legal cases alongside literature.

Wiess College junior Owen Silberg said such lectures expand his understanding of the world beyond what he learns in class.

“Pedagogically, it’s useful to have something to build a basis of knowledge from beyond what you’ve studied in your course where you can go learn about a focused piece of information,” Silberg said. “I mean, professors are experts, ‘capital-E’ experts on whatever they’re talking about.” 

Each lecture will be about 45 minutes, followed by time for questions. Registration is required, but tickets are free.

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