Mark your calendar and register now for these special events! | |
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Time will be reserved for audience Q&A. These two Zoom-based talks will be recorded and distributed to enrolled students for viewing post-event. Register in advance to receive the video, even if you are unable to attend the live online session.
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Author Visit: Ava Purkiss
Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America (2023)
Thursday, October 17 • 1:00pm-2:15pm • Zoom • Course 12818 • $35
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Meet Ava Purkiss, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, as she shares insights from her groundbreaking book about historical figures including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Michelle Obama, who championed fitness for Black women and children alongside broader efforts for racial equality. Amidst the struggle against segregation and political oppression, Black women devised new approaches to the battle for full citizenship and social justice. Through exercises such as calisthenics, gymnastics, and nature walks, Black women demonstrated their physical and moral fitness for national belonging. Purkiss explores how physical activity was not merely a path to individual health but also a way for Black women to uplift their race and, over time, to ensure that citizens of all races have access to recreational spaces, including YMCAs, beaches, parks, and playgrounds.
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AVA PURKISS is an assistant professor of women's and gender studies and American culture at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, health, and the body. Purkiss earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin and has received numerous fellowships and grants supporting her research. She is the recipient of the 2017 Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize for best dissertation in U.S. women’s history and the 2018 Letitia Woods Brown prize for best article in African American women’s history from the Association of Black Women Historians.
LORI ROTSKOFF is a cultural historian, writer, educator, and public speaker specializing in memoirs and narrative nonfiction, childhood and youth, women’s and gender studies, and arts and culture. She studied history and literature at Northwestern University and earned a PhD in American Studies at Yale.
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Author Visit: Catherine Newman
Sandwich (2024)
Thursday, October 24 • 10:00am-11:30am • Zoom • Course 12790 • $30
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In conversation with Anna Katsavos, Catherine Newman will discuss her instant New York Times bestseller, Sandwich (2024). Characteristic of her other publications, this novel concerns the ordinary, inevitable, and often messy daily struggles from the perspective of a woman sandwiched between her aging parents and grown children. The narrator is neurotic, sentimental, joyous, sorrowful, and slightly unhinged all at once. Funny observations about the constantly changing stages of life infuse the story that unfolds during the family's annual vacation in Cape Cod.
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CATHERINE NEWMAN is the author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp, the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, and the novels We All Want Impossible Things and Sandwich. She writes the Substack newsletter Crone Sandwich and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O: The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she is the academic department coordinator/secretary of the Creative Writing Center at Amherst College.
ANNA KATSAVOS, PhD, is an experienced book group facilitator. A SUNY Professor Emerita of English Literature and Women’s Studies, she has received numerous awards for teaching, and her scholarship has been published in a variety of literary journals. She has interviewed many best-selling authors and has presented interactive programs focusing on a wide range of women’s issues. Additionally, she conducts writing, editing and publishing workshops.
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