Syracuse University's 26th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Public
Affairs Lecture will feature Deborah McDowell, director of the Carter G. Woodson
Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.
McDowell will present "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Martin Luther King in His Time
and Ours" on Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium. The lecture is
sponsored by the Department of African American Studies in The College of Arts and
Sciences and is free and open to the public.
Additionally, AAS will host an "Open Dialogue with Deborah McDowell" on
Thursday, March 26, at 11 a.m. in Room 219 of Sims Hall. The session is free and
open to the public.
Both events were postponed from February.
McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virginia,
is a well-known writer, scholar and editor of African American literature for both
academic and general audiences. Her books include "Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass" (Oxford University Press, 1999), "Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories
of Kin" (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997) and "The Changing Same: Studies in Fiction by
African-American Women" (Indiana University Press, 1994). She has also published
numerous articles, book chapters and scholarly editions.
McDowell is the founder of the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon
Press and served as its editor from 1985-93, overseeing the re-publication of 14 novels
from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also serves as a period editor for the
Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, was contributing editor to the
D.C. Heath Anthology of American literature, and was co-editor with Arnold
Rampersad of "Slavery and the Literary Imagination" (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988).
McDowell is the recipient of numerous grants, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting
Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute, the National Research Council Fellowship of
the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She
is co-chair, with David Blight, of a scholarly group sponsored by The Gilder Lehrman
Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, and she
was recently elected to the executive committee of the Prose Fiction division of the
Modern Language Association.
McDowell received a B.A. from Tuskegee University and both master's and doctoral
degrees from Purdue University.
