MOUNT VERNON — Trudier Harris, a scholar on African-American literature and folklore whose books include her recently published memoir, “Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South,” will give the keynote address at the second annual Feminist Symposium on Saturday, March 12, at Cornell College.
Harris will speak on “ ‘Cultured Hell,’ Hellish Culture: Black Women Writers and the South” at 3:15 p.m. on the Orange Carpet in The Commons. The symposium is a project of the Women's Action Group, a student organization at Cornell.
Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her books include “From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature,” “Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals,” “Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin,” “Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison,” “The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan,” “Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature” and “South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature.”
This year Harris won the UNC Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is working on a book on African-American writers and the South.
The Feminist Symposium will feature art, music, research, presentations, poetry and other material that is related to women and women’s issues in academia. Presentations and displays will take place in Hedges Conference Room and Shaw Lounge from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. The symposium is open to the public and admission is free.
In addition to Women’s Action Group, symposium sponsors are the Office of Intercultural Life, Black Awareness Cultural Organization, Lecture, Artists and Cultural Events (LACE) consortium, the English department, ethnic studies program, Cultural Understanding and Exploration and the women’s studies program.
