From Mexico to Harlem, from white liberal anti-racism to campaign fundraising, UNC Charlotte researchers will lead four intellectual journeys as part of the 2015-16 Personally Speaking Series.
Faculty authors Jürgen Buchenau, Shannon Sullivan, Jeffrey Leak and Eric Heberlig will discuss their books and how they came to write them during the sixth annual Personally Speaking Series presented by the University’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences in conjunction with the J. Murrey Atkins Library.
Buchenau, a professor and chair of the History Department, will deliver the first presentation of the Personally Speaking series related to his work “Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century.” The talk will be at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 1, at UNC Charlotte Center City. Buchenau’s concise historical analysis of the Mexican Revolution explores its causes, dynamics, consequences and legacies. The work examines various perspectives including those of campesinos and workers; politicians, artists, intellectuals and students; women and men; and the well-heeled, the dispossessed and the multitude in the middle.
Sullivan is chair of the Department of Philosophy and a professor of philosophy and health psychology. Her “Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism” identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that Sullivan sums up as “white middle-class goodness,” an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. The work was named a Ms. Magazine "Must-Read Book of 2014." Her Personally Speaking talk is set for 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 10, at UNC Charlotte Center City.
Leak, who delivers the third presentation in the Personally Speaking Series, is an associate professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of the New South. His “Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas” is a literary mystery, which received the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award for 2014. In this biography of Dumas, Leak takes the reader from Dumas’ origins in Sweet Home, Ark., to his intriguing literary and cultural experiences, to the posthumous publication of his work. A writer associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, Dumas held much promise until a rookie transit cop took his life on a subway platform in Harlem. Leak’s presentation will be at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016, at UNC Charlotte Center City.
Heberlig, a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, is the final 2015-16 series speaker. He will discuss his work “Congressional Parties, Institutional Ambition and the Financing of Majority Control.” According to Heberlig, close competition for majority party control of the U.S. House of Representatives has transformed congressional parties from legislative coalitions into partisan fundraising machines. With the need for ever-increasing sums of money to fuel the permanent campaign for majority control of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats have made large donations to their parties and their candidates mandatory for members who seek to advance in Congress. The book won the LBJ Foundation’s Hardeman Prize for 2014. Heberlig’s talk is set for Tuesday, March 15, 2016, at UNC Charlotte Center City.