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The African American Biography Project invites submissions for a national conference in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, on September 14-17, 2006, Titled "The Shaping Role of Place in African American Biography," the conference will celebrate 18 months of work by teachers and consulting scholars to develop African American studies curricula for local schools. This work is taking place under the aegis of a National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People" project grant. Lead institutions are the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail, based in Great Barrington.
The focus of the project is on five African Americans(Agrippa Hull, Elizabeth "Mumbet" Freeman, Samuel Harrison, James VanDerZee, and W.E.B. Du Bois) whose stories link Berkshire County with events and movements of enduring national and international significance. The intention of the conference is to provide an intellectual platform for k-12 teachers, community college, and college level professors to explore the most appropriate ways to link local history with events and movements of enduring national and international significance.
The conference will attempt to adopt a very comprehensive approach to examining the issues of race, gender, place and memory in working with local communities. Specialists from various disciplines are encouraged to participate. The conference is explicitly interdisciplinary, bringing together a national group of scholars from the fields of History, Education, English, African American Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology.
David Levering Lewis, the Julius Silver University Professor and professor of history at New York University who is well know for his Pulitzer Prize winning two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Carnes, professor of history at Barnard, has received the American Historical Association's award for the best article on teaching history for the article, entitled "Inciting Speech," will be two of our featured speakers.
Teachers and scholars are invited to submit a CV and a 1 page absract by June 1, 2006 to:
The Shaping Role of Place Conference
Professor Frances Jones-Sneed
Department of History
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
North Adams, Massachusetts 01247-4100
e-mail fjonessn@mcla.edu or call 413-662-5541
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