To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University Virtual Gallery & Roundtable Discussion

Join us for the unveiling of the virtual gallery “To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University.” This virtual gallery is a vibrant visual narrative experience that confronts the legacy of racism within the University’s history and present, shares historical and contemporary examples of anti-racist work at the University, details significant student activism efforts over the years, and incorporates community members’ constructive visions for a more equal and just University and world.

The virtual gallery includes a chronology of key moments and people in Princeton University’s racial history and several thematic sections in which attendees can explore and learn. This launch event will alternate between attendees looking through the virtual gallery themselves and learning from the reflections of roundtable discussion participants: Professor Brian Eugenio Herrera (Lewis Center for the Arts & GSS), Professor Tera Hunter (African American Studies & History), Professor Beth Lew-Williams (History), Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics), co-moderated by Tennille Haynes (Carl A. Fields Center) and Judy Jarvis (Office of Wintersession & Campus Engagement). Audience members will be able to ask questions and engage with the interactive parts of the site.

“To Be Known and Heard” is a joint project of the Office of Wintersession and Campus Engagement and the Carl A. Fields Center, with co-sponsorship from Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, University Archives, Office of the Vice President for Campus Life, the Campus Conversations on Identities Fund, the Program in American Studies, the History Department, the Sociology Department and the Humanities Council. The virtual gallery was designed by Isometric Studio, and the work was informed by the ideas and feedback of an advisory group consisting of professors, administrators, and students.

To request accommodations for this event, please contact the workshop or event facilitator at least 3 working days prior to the event.

Roundtable Participants Bios:

Professor Brian Eugenio Herrera’s academic and artistic work examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. He is author of The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound, 2015). His book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Michigan, 2015) was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and received an Honorable Mention for the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. Also a performer, Brian's autobiographical storywork performances (including I Was the Voice of Democracy and TouchTones) have been presented in venues large and small across the United States, as well as Beirut and Abu Dhabi. Professor Herrera is Associate Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where he is also a core faculty member in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and a faculty affiliate with the Programs in American Studies, Music Theater and Latino Studies.

Professor Tera Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She teaches courses in 19th and 20th century U. S. History. Her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017) is her latest book and won numerous prizes, including the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History; Mary Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association. Her first book, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, was awarded the H. L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association, among other prizes. Professor Hunter is working on a new book project: “The African American Marriage Gap in the Twentieth Century” and is co-authoring The Making of a People: A History of African-Americans with Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis under contract with W. W. Norton Press.

Professor Beth Lew-Williams is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia. The Chinese Must Go won the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Halley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Sally and Ken Owens Prize from the Western History Association, the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Society of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Caroline Bancroft History Prize, and was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference book prize. Her next book project, tentatively titled John Doe Chinaman: Race and Law in the American West, considers the regulation of Chinese migrants within the United States during the nineteenth century. Professor Lew-Williams is affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Asian American/Diaspora Studies.

Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a historian of the ancient Roman Mediterranean with interests in the comparative history of slavery and citizenship, North American and Caribbean classical reception, and critical race studies. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015; recipient of an Alex Award from the American Library Association) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020). He has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge 2017) and recently published chapters on Dominican classical reception in Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford 2020) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford 2020). His current projects include a co-authored study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism (under contract with Harvard), a co-edited volume on Rome in the 4th century BCE, and a co-authored book-length essay on race and racism in the disciplinary formation of Classics. At Princeton, he is an Associate Professor of Classics and is affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies, and with the University Center for Human Values.

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