About this Event
The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) and the Africana Studies Program hosts an exciting conversation with authors Dr. Amey Victoria Adkins Jones, Dr. Meredith Clark, and Dr. Mary Frances Phillips in discussion about their newest books.
Mary Frances Phillips (BS, Michigan State University; MA, The Ohio State University; Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on race and gender in post-1945 social movements and the carceral state. Her research areas include the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Feminism, and Black Power Studies.
Her book, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins will be released in January 2025 with New York University Press’ Black Power Series. Black Panther Woman is both a critical study and biography of Black Panther Party veteran Ericka Huggins, one of the longest-serving women members in the organization. Her book historicizes women’s Pr*son organizing, resistance, and collision with law enforcement of women political prisoners. She has published journal articles in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, the Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Western Journal of Black Studies, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, and the Syllabus Journal. Outside of the academy, her essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, Black Youth Project, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, Black Perspectives. Her work has garnered media attention in TIME Magazine, the New-York Historical Museum & Library Women at the Center blog series, the Detroit Free Press; BronxNet Cable Television; Bronx News 12; WBAI Pacifica Radio, New York City; and WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio.
Dr. Meredith Clark is currently an Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication in the Hussman School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a journalist by training, and has worked for and contributed to the Capital Outlook (Fla.), the Tallahassee Democrat, the Austin American-Statesman, the Raleigh News & Observer, Poynter.org’s diversity column, USA TODAY. Dr. Clark's research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power – covering everything from media processes like newsroom hiring and reporting practices to the digital narratives constructed by social media communities. TheRoot.com named her No. 66 of the most 100 influential Black Americans on their 2015 Root 100 list.
Her book We Tried to Tell Y'all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives uses interviews, news analysis, and personal observation to present how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press. Dr. Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in 'mainstream' media. From chapters that recognize the "locomotive power" of Black women and femmes' intellectual labor to a thorough takedown of so-called "cancel culture", We Tried to Tell Y'all offers readers a rich exploration of the latest chapter of Black media production.
Dr. Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is a theologian and black studies scholar with expertise in Mariology, theological anthropology, and womanist and black feminist thought. Her research specifically considers black madonnas and iconography, human trafficking, the Pr*son industrial complex, racial justice, visual culture, and artificial intelligence. She is a practicing birth worker, a trained iconographer, and has a career background in UX Copywriting and Design. Outside of academia, Dr. Adkins-Jones is a Baptist minister who frequently preaches and teaches around the country. A ‘displaced Southerner,’ she joyfully builds community and hospitality between Boston, MA and Newark, NJ.
Her book Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology will be released in June 2025. Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology begins with the claim 'Mark is Black' to challenge how Christian thinking of salvation, possibility, and identity are challenged when we rethink assumptions about race, gender, and divine significance through the lens of the Virgin Mary, and specifically, through a return to the Black Madonna. Immaculate Misconceptions considers how Christian collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Blackness have worked theologically to deny Blackness from the realms of the sacred. Through the lens of art and icon, the treatise thinks through Black women's reproductive legacies, and revisits the figure of the Black Madonna, as a necessary return to the womb as hush harbor, birth as liturgy, and Black life as holy.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Horticulture Hall, 300 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, United States
USD 0.00
