URI’s humanities lecture series expands discussion on ‘Sustaining Democracy’ this spring

The University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities will continue its year-long look at “Sustaining Democracy” this spring through the groundbreaking work of four guest speakers.

At a time of wide concern about challenges to democracy, the series showcases the vital role the arts and humanities play in interpreting and communicating threats to democracy and offering paths to democratic engagement. The spring speakers will focus on such issues confronting democracy as racism, censorship and the meaning of freedom. The lectures are free and open to the public. The Island Free Library will be streaming this series live!

* Thursday, Feb. 13th, with artist Eric Gottesman, the William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement at George Washington University. Gottesman’s presentation will focus on “Where Can We Go From Here?” at 5 p.m. Gottesman’s work explores issues such as nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations, questioning accepted ideas of power and fostering critical self-reflection and creative expression. In his talk, he will discuss his collaborative work over the last 25 years, which has brought together photography, art, teaching and civic action.

*  Thursday, Feb. 27th, historian Shannon King will discuss “The Politics of Safety: The Black Freedom Struggle,” at 5 p.m. in the Galanti Lounge. Focusing on research from his 2024 book, “The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York,” King will explore Black resistance to racial violence outside the South from the Great Depression to the 1990s and offer alternative ways to understand and teach African American history and Black social movements in the U.S.

* Wednesday, Mar. 19th, with Emily Drabinski, @ 4:00pm Queens College, City University of New York Since 2021, libraries have become a target of organized forces seeking to suppress the stories of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people and our histories. Attempts to remove books from library shelves have reached record numbers while legislation in states from Florida to Idaho has enshrined censorship into law. Such restrictions on the right to think, write, and read place libraries at the center of the fight for American democracy. Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor at the Queens College (CUNY) Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. She edits Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books. Drabinski served as the 2023-24 President of the American Library Association.

* Thursday, April 3rd, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie will discuss the tensions between democracy, which requires institutions, sacrifice, and compromise, and the American version of freedom. Jefferson Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. The Nation magazine described him as “one of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience.” His most recent book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and tells the tale of generations of local fights against the federal government that prop up a particular version of American freedom: the freedom to oppress others. Cowie’s other texts include, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (winner of the Francis Parkman Prize the Best Book in American History and the Merle Curti Award for the Best Book in Social and Intellectual History), and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (winner of the Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History). Cowie is a passionate and dedicated educator, garnering a number of teaching awards during his career. From 2008 to 2012, he served as the first House Professor and Dean of William Keeton House on Cornell’s innovative West Campus. He serves on the Board of Trustees for Deep Springs College. Cowie holds the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University.