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Mar. 1: At the Intersection of Academia and Activism

  • 754 Schermerhorn Extension Columbia University New York, NY, 10027 USA (map)

WHEN: March 1, 2017, 6:30 - 8 PM

WHERE: 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Columbia University

Please join us for the first event in our new Oral History in Our Times Series! This evening will include a public interview with John D’Emilio, conducted by Terrell Frazier, and a panel discussion with Profs. Mary Marshall Clark and Mignon Moore.


JOHN D'EMILIO, INTERVIEWEE
Columbia University Alum & Professor Emeritus of History, University of Illinois-Chicago

John D’Emilio, who retired in 2014, continues to research and write about the U.S. since World War II, social movements, and the history of sexuality.

A pioneer in the field of gay and lesbian studies, he is the author or editor of more than half a dozen books, including Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1998); Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, with Estelle Freedman (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1997); Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, 2003), a National Book Award finalist; and The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Duke University Press, 2002). An expanded 25th anniversary 3rd edition of Intimate Matters is slated for publication in January 2013.

D’Emilio has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; was a finalist for the National Book Award; and received the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime contributions to gay and lesbian studies.

A former co-chair of the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, he was also the founding director of its Policy Institute. Intimate Matters was quoted by Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, the historic decision that declared state sodomy statutes unconstitutional.

When not working, he watches old movies, solves sudoku puzzles, and searches for New York-style pizza in Chicago.


TERRELL FRAZIER, INTERVIEWER
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Terrell Frazier is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow at Columbia University. He is also a 2016 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. His research interests include political sociology, social movements, social networks, organizations, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality and stratification and inequality.

His current research—a study of activist network structures in New York City—investigates the relationship between social movement actors’ social positions and their capacities for strategic action. His work with Adam Reich and Peter Bearman also examines health and disease at the intersections of identity, social position and processes of advantage and disadvantage, to illuminate both the etiology of health disparities in marginalized communities and the relationship between the social patterning of disease and the patterning of related social movements. 

Prior to joining the Sociology department Terrell completed his M.A. in African American Studies at Columbia, where he has also worked as a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) and Education and Outreach Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History. He received a B.A. in Social Relations & Policy and Journalism from Michigan State University.


MARY MARSHALL CLARK, PANELIST
Director of Columbia Center for Oral History Research

In addition to being the Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research located in INCITE, Mary Marshall Clark is co-founder and director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program, created in 2008-09. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002, and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association.

She was the co-principal investigator, with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal oral history project through which over 1,000 hours of interviews were taken with eye-witnesses and immigrants and others who suffered in the aftermath of the events. She also directed related projects on the aftermath of September 11th in New York City.

She has directed projects on the Carnegie Corporation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Japanese Internment on the East Coast, the Apollo Theater and Women in the Visual Arts. She has interviewed lead figures in the media, human rights, women’s movements and the arts.

Mary Marshall writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. Her current work focuses on the global impact of torture and detention policies at Guantánamo Bay. Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September, 2011. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Clark holds two masters degrees from Union Theological Seminary.


MIGNON MOORE, PANELIST
Columbia College Alum & Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Barnard College  

Professor Mignon Moore has research and teaching interests in the sociology of family, race, gender, sexuality, qualitative methods, aging, and adolescence. Her first book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (California Press, 2011) examined the intersection of race with sexual orientation for family-building and lesbian identity among African-American women.

Her current research includes a new book project on the social histories of LGBT seniors in New York and Los Angeles, the negotiation of religious and community life for lesbians and gay men of faith, and the promotion of healthy aging for racial and ethnic minority elders. Before arriving at Barnard she was a member of the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles and at Columbia University.


This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required.

"At the Intersection of Academia and Activism" is co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History ResearchInterdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, and Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University.