Photo: M. Zaborowska, 2014. Outside Baldwin’s study in St. Paul-de-Vence France.
This 5×5 Incubator Grant team came together to discuss various implementations of widely-conceived humanities literacy, and specifically its intersections with social space, race, class, gender, queer sexuality, activism, and national identity.The team’s goal included: building interdisciplinary bridges – given diverse fields of the researchers – and engaging computing technologies to disseminate novel approaches to text, material culture, visual reproduction and representation.
Stephen Ward and Magda Zaborowska, as historians, activists, and literary and cultural studies critics are now working on houses that were once inhabited by famous figures –the Boggs’s House in Detroit and Baldwin’s in St. Paul-de-Vence, France. We will brainstorm ideas on how to use traditional archival methods and recent technologies to document and make accessible the material remnants of important American lives. We will consider how to best preserve traces of black lives that were often erased or distorted by forces of history, imperialism, or politics of respectability.
Team members include: Stephen Berrey, Associate Professor of American Culture, Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies for American Culture; Frieda Ekotto, Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies; Dahlia Petrus, Academic Program Specialist; Stephen Ward, Director, Semester in Detroit; Associate Professor Residental College, DAAS; Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor of American Culture and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies.