RC Faculty Contribute to NY Times About Prison Conditions and Blackness in Opera
On April 28, Heather Ann Thompson, Professor in the LSA departments of History, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Residential College, contributed an op-ed entitled "How a South Carolina Prison Riot Really Went Down" that you can read here. Heather won the Pulitzer and many other awards for her 2016 book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, published by Pantheon Books. You can learn more about Blood in the Water here.
Then on May 4, an article entitled "Beethoven’s 200-Year-Old ‘Fidelio’ Enters Today’s Prisons" features the scholarship of Naomi André, Associate Professor in the departments of Women’s Studies, Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Residential College. Naomi also serves as the Associate Director for Faculty at the RC. You can read the NY Times article here, in which her upcoming May 2018 book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press) is quoted. You can learn more about this book here. Though the Times article doesn't mention it, Naomi has published about her experiences facilitating discussions and analyses of Bizet's Carmen in a women's prison. You can read about that in her essay, "Teaching Opera in Prison" in the book, The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Michele Tracy Berger & Kathleen Guidroz, published by University of North Carolina Press, 2010.