Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program Archives - ��Ƶ

The Role of the Courts in Our Democracy

Stephen Garone — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:40:00 +0000

This event, moderated by Associate Professor of Philosophy Anna Gotlib, will feature the following speakers: Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, co-host of Strict Scrutiny podcast, MSN��Ƶ legal analyst, and Robert L. Hess Scholar-in Residence 2025; Deborah N. Archer, president, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law and associate dean, experiential education and clinical programs at NYU Law School; Lee Gelernt, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and director of the project’s Access to the Courts program, and adjunct professor at Columbia Law School; and Leah Litman, professor of law at University of Michigan Law School and co-host of Strict Scrutiny.

Sponsored by the Frederic Ewen Civil Liberties and Academic Freedom Lecture and the Department of History at ��Ƶ.

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History and the Courts

Stephen Garone — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This conversation takes its inspiration from Melissa Murray’s 2024 article “Making History” , in which she asks, “What does it mean for the Court to ‘do history’?”

Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, co-host of Strict Scrutiny podcast, MSN��Ƶ legal analyst, and Robert L. Hess Scholar-in Residence 2025. She will be joined by Christen Hammock Jones, doctoral student in American legal history at University of Pennsylvania; Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, professor at Columbia University School of Law; and Noah Rosenblum, associate professor of law at New York University School of Law and faculty director of the Vanderbilt Scholars Program and Katzmann Symposium.

Moderated by Anna Law, Kurz Chair of Constitutional Rights and Professor of Political Science, ��Ƶ.

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Dobbs and the Future of Individual Rights

Stephen Garone — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:30:00 +0000

Join us for this discussion with Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, co-host of Strict Scrutiny podcast, MSN��Ƶ legal analyst, and Robert L. Hess Scholar-in Residence 2025. Murray will be joined by:

Alina Das, professor of clinical law, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic
Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project
Nelson Tebbe, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress

Moderated by Professor of Political Science Paisley Currah.

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The 2025 Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture: Funhouse Footnote Four—How the Roberts Court Is Remaking the Constitutional Order

Stephen Garone — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:00:00 +0000

, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; co-host of Strict Scrutiny podcast; MSN��Ƶ legal analyst, and Robert L. Hess Scholar-in Residence 2024–25, delivers the 2025 Hess Memorial Lecture based on her forthcoming book, Woke Warriors: The Roberts Court’s Racial Reckoning.

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Hess Scholars Paul Ortiz and Barbara Smith to Lecture on “Defending the Humanities”

Richard Pietras — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:26:07 +0000

After a successful tenure as ��Ƶ’s Hess Scholar-in-Residence (HSR) for 2023, celebrated writer and activist Barbara Smith will help welcome 2024’s HSR Paul Ortiz to discuss the importance of the humanities. The event will be held on Thursday, November 30, at 2:30 p.m. in the Woody Tanger Auditorium. It will also be .

Author and Activist Barbara Smith Served as ��Ƶ’s 2022–23 Hess Scholar-in-Residence

Ortiz is a professor of history at the University of Florida (UF) and will serve as ��Ƶ’s Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence for 2024. He was president of the faculty union at UF and has been critical of political attacks on the humanities and higher education.

Ortiz serves as the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at UF. He is the author of several books, including An African American and Latinx History of the United States (2018) and Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (2005). He is co-editor of People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century (2021) and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (2014). Ortiz also has published essays in The American Historical Review, Latino Studies, Cultural Dynamics, The Oral History Review, Kalfou, Florida Historical Quarterly, and many other journals.

In 2013, Ortiz received the César E. Chávez Action and Commitment Award, from the Florida Education Association, AFL-CIO. He is past president of the United Faculty of Florida-UF (FEA-AFL-CIO), the union that represents tenured and nontenure track faculty at UF.

As part of this event, the ��Ƶ community is invited to enjoy to a selection of writings by Smith and Ortiz.

This event is sponsored by the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities; the Maria E. Sánchez Center for Latino Studies; the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI); and the Robert L. Hess Memorial Fund, in cooperation with the Office of the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Office of the Dean of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts; the departments of Africana Studies; Classics; Communication Arts, Sciences, and Disorders; English; History; Judaic Studies; Modern Languages and Literatures; Philosophy; Political Science; Puerto Rican and Latino Studies; and Sociology; the programs in Caribbean Studies, Urban Sustainability, Studies in Religion, and Women’s and Gender Studies; the Center for the Study of Brooklyn; the Immigrant Student Success Office; the ��Ƶ Chapter of the Professional Staff Congress; the Frederic Ewen Lecture on Civil Liberties and Academic Freedom; and the Freedom to Teach, Freedom to Read, Freedom to Learn Lecture Series at ��Ƶ.

About the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture

In cooperation with the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture is supported by the Robert L. Hess Fund. It is named for and honors the eighth president of ��Ƶ.

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Author and Activist Barbara Smith to Lecture at ��Ƶ on March 16

Communications — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:32:57 +0000

In one of her first public appearances since 2020 that will serve as an extraordinary complement to ��Ƶ’s Women’s History Month celebration, author and activist will discuss the values that have shaped her remarkable life with the extended campus community on March 16 from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Smith’s lecture, “What I Believe,” will be an intimate exploration into her life as a trailblazer who broke new ground as a Black feminist, lesbian, activist, author, publisher, and independent scholar who inspired generations. She was among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s.

“I am so honored to serve as the Hess Scholar-in-Residence during the 2022–23 academic year,” Smith said. “At a time when some in our nation wish to limit the information and ideas that students can access, I look forward to expansive dialogues with members of ��Ƶ’s wonderfully diverse community.”

“As a writer, publisher, teacher, and organizer, Barbara Smith is a transformative force for justice. Her work has reshaped the American academy and society. We are honored to host her for a week of events culminating in the Hess Memorial Lecture,” said Gaston Alonso, interim director for the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and associate professor of political science at ��Ƶ.

This lecture event is free and open to the public and serves as the main highlight of the college’s for 2022–23.

The event will also feature President Michelle J. Anderson as well as , distinguished professor of political science, and Professor of English , interim dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

On November 29, Smith was part of a conversation on campus with Theoharis when they discussed selected clips from the documentary , which features Smith and is based on Theoharis’ research and of the same name.

A prolific writer and publisher, Smith has edited three major collections about Black women: Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue (with Lorraine Bethel, 1979); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott, 1982); and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). She is also the co-author, with Elly Bulkin and Minnie Bruce Pratt, of Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984). Smith is the general editor of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History (with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem, 1998). A collection of her essays, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom, was published by Rutgers University Press in 1998. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks with Barbara Smith, was published by SUNY Press in 2014.

The evening will also include mezzo-soprano Lucia Bradford and the Conservatory Singers, ��Ƶ’s select chamber ensemble, who will perform “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” The group will be conducted by Associate Professor/Director of Choral Studies , director of the New York Philharmonic Chorus.

This signature event will be held on Thursday, March 16, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Claire Tow Theater at ��Ƶ. It will also be livestreamed on the .

Highlights From the Hess Week Calendar, March 13–20

Full calendar and speakers

Barbara Smith—Hess Scholar-in-Residence Library Exhibit: An exhibit located in the main entrance of the ��Ƶ Library that will highlight the works and legacy of Barbara Smith. Archival material from the Robert L. Hess Collection will also be presented. Curated by Professor and Librarian Helen Georgas.

March 13, 11 a.m.–12:15 p.m.: President Anderson Welcomes 2022–23 Hess Scholar-in-Residence Barbara Smith Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and on Zoom

March 13, 2:15–3:30 p.m.: “If Black women were free…”: The State of Black Feminism 2023 Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and on Zoom

March 14, 2:15–3:45 p.m.: “Transforming the U.S. Academy” Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and livestreamed on the .

March 15, 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: “Justice or Just Us?: Defining a Queer Agenda” Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and livestreamed on the .

March 15, 3:40–4:55 p.m.: “Teaching as a Liberating Practice” Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and livestreamed on the .

March 16, 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: “Working for Liberation and Having a Damn Good Time” Woody Tanger Auditorium, ��Ƶ Library, and livestreamed on the .

March 20, 6–7:15 p.m.: “Putting Class Back Into Intersectionality” Online via Zoom

About the Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program

The Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program, established by ��Ƶ, is supported by the Robert L. Hess Fund. The program serves as a permanent tribute to the scholarly commitment of Robert L. Hess, exemplified during his tenure as president of ��Ƶ. It represents the ideal of the educated individual—knowledgeable, thoughtful, inquiring, alive to the shared purposes and concerns linking all intellectual pursuits. More particularly, it evokes the scholarly and academic virtues embodied in the curriculum at ��Ƶ.

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Author and Activist Barbara Smith Serving as ��Ƶ’s Hess Scholar-in-Residence for 2022-23

Susan Landers — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 11:43:45 +0000

Barbara Smith—who has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s as an author, activist, and independent scholar—is ��Ƶ’s Hess Scholar-in-Residence for 2022-23. Smith was among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States.

Jeanne Theoharis

On November 29, from 2:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., Smith will be part of a conversation on campus with ��Ƶ’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science Jeanne Theoharis. The pair will discuss selected clips from the documentary, “,” which features Smith and is also based on Theoharis’ research and book of the same name. Smith and Theoharis will explore Rosa Parks’ life of freedom fighting, how the many myths of Parks and the movement cloud our understandings of social change, the roles and experiences of women in the movement, and the lessons this history provides for the work of organizing and social justice today. After their conversation, there will be a Q&A period for students, staff, and faculty.

The event will be held in the library’s Woody Tanger Auditorium and will also be livestreamed on the Wolfe Institute’s YouTube channel. At the speaker’s request, masks are required for the in-person event. Room 441 in the library will also be open for guests to watch the lecture online.

You can watch the livestream of the event

To stream the documentary for free before the event, ��Ƶ students, faculty, and staff can email: wolfeinstitute@brooklyn.cuny.edu

More Hess Scholar-in-Residence lectures will be held in March 2023, and a complete schedule of events will be made available soon.

About the Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program

��Ƶ Welcomes Lisa Lowe, Ph.D., as Its 2021–2022 Hess Scholar in Residence

Susan Landers — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 18:00:53 +0000

Professor of American Studies at Yale University will headline discussions on the Asian-American experience, legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and empire in the contemporary United States.

Lisa Lowe, Ph.D., and Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, will serve as ��Ƶ’s 2021–2022 Hess Scholar-in-Residence.

In a free, online event open to the public, Lowe will present a keynote lecture as part of this series on Oct. 28 at 5 p.m. “The Colonial Present” will consider the legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and empire in the contemporary United States, and the endurance of anticolonial struggles. Lowe will address the conflicts between given national history and what that account suppresses, and responds to Cedric Robinson’s call for a relationship to history that “resurrects events which have systematically been made to vanish from our intellectual consciousness,” to transform how we understand our political present.

An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the study of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Lowe’s teaching interests include Asian American studies and critical race and ethnic studies, colonialism and U.S. empire, and cultures of globalization.

Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program events will run from Oct. 25 to 28.

More About the Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program

The purpose of the program is to invite to the campus each year a distinguished individual representative of an academic discipline at the college, with the selection of such scholars being rotated through the disciplines. The distinction of the scholars in residence is based on their accomplishments and stature, not on their affiliation; they may be drawn from the academy, from the professions, or from public life. They must be able to speak to issues of their disciplines as well as significant issues of concern to the entire ��Ƶ community.

The scholar in residence engages in a variety of activities appropriate to the discipline, whether public lectures, performances, master classes, or guest lectures in undergraduate courses; participates in panels or symposia; and meets informally and socially with students, faculty, alums, and friends of ��Ƶ.

Previous Robert L. Hess Scholars in Residence

Vartan Gregorian, 1993–94
Ann Douglas, 1995–96
James S. Langer, 1996–97
Daniel Miller, 2000–01
Robin D.G. Kelley, 2001–02
Agnieszka Holland, 2005–06
Marc Shell, 2007–08
Eleanor J. Sterling, 2009–10
Sean Wilentz, 2012–13
Thomas Frank, 2014–15
Rob Nixon, 2015–16
John L. Jackson, Jr., 2016–17
Edwidge Danticat, 2017–18
José David Saldivar, 2018–19
Winona LaDuke, 2019–20

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Hess Scholar in Residence Winona LaDuke Says We Must Take the “Green Path” to Restore Our Environment and Economy

Susan Landers — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 12:02:36 +0000

Looking to indigenous people for guidance is a good start, said the First Nation activist.

“I’m speaking to you from Round Lake, which is the headwaters of the Red River that flows to Hudson Bay. . . I’m in the heart of the Great Lakes territory, the Anishinaabe territory,” said Winona LaDuke, First Nation activist and keynote speaker at the 2020 Hess Scholar in Residence memorial lecture. LaDuke’s talk, titled “Lighting the 8th Fire, Economics for the 7th Generation,” concluded a week of virtual events that included panel discussions and conversations on decolonization in the classroom, social justice, and sustainability, among other topics.

“In our Anishinaabe prophecies, we are told during the time of the seventh fire we will have a choice between two paths. One is well-worn, but it is scorched, and the other is not well-worn, and it is green. It is our choice upon which path to embark.”

LaDuke is the first indigenous scholar to receive the residency. “This event, and this entire week, which is inspired by student activism, is in line with ��Ƶ’s mission to provide a transformative and distinctive education to all people of New York City,” said Rosamond S. King, director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, which hosted the program. “It is part of a process to become more thoughtful and more respectful, and to more deeply incorporate indigenous and Native American cultures, philosophies, and peoples into the curriculum, faculty, student body, and staff of ��Ƶ.”

LaDuke’s work “is critical to our world, our nation, and our campus,” said Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Anne Lopes. “She addresses environmental, economic, and racial justice issues through the lens of indigenous studies and deep advocacy.”

LaDuke, who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, explained during the Zoom event that the price tag for taking from the land and not giving back, and not being reverent of the earth and its creatures, is the havoc that is being wreaked today—citing the effects of extreme weather and the destruction of massive amounts of America’s western woodlands and ecosystems by wildfires.

LaDuke believes that the next economy must arise from what she calls “The Sitting Bull Plan/8th Fire,” which includes a return to biodiversity (“Where there are indigenous people there is still biodiversity. Eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity is in the territories of indigenous peoples.”) She also stated that America must localize its agriculture and find innovative ways to grow food in urban areas, replace its aging energy infrastructure with more energy-efficient modes of transportation (e.g., electrify the rail system and power it from wind energy sourced from tribal lands), and shake off historical and ecological amnesia to care for and defend our environment. By doing this, we can go forward on the green path.

“America was great when there were 8,000 varieties of corn and when you could drink the water from every stream and river,” said LaDuke. “Where I live is still the place where the wild things are. Wild rice is one of our most sacred foods. For 200 years, our people have fought to protect our rice from encroachment, from dam and pipeline projects. I know we can make change, and believe that we can put our good hearts and minds together to transform.”

In cooperation with the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture, supported by the Robert L. Hess Fund, was part of the 2019–2020 Scholar-in-Residence Program named for and in honor of the eighth president of ��Ƶ, whose commitment to scholarship and “the educated individual—knowledgeable, thoughtful, inquiring, alive to the shared purposes and concerns lining all intellectual pursuits,” marked his tenure.

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Faculty and Staff Reading Group Spring 2020 Schedule

Susan Landers — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:05:59 +0000

All faculty and staff are invited to selected readings of Winona LaDuke’s Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press, 2005), performed by ��Ƶ Professor Conor Tomás Reed. LaDuke is the Hess Scholar in Residence.

The reading group will meet from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in 283 Library on the following Thursdays: February 27, March 19, and April 23.

Members can pick up a free copy of Recovering the Sacred from the Wolfe offices in 2231 Boylan Hall. Participants are encouraged to attend the Hess events during March 16–20 for the opportunity to discuss LaDuke’s work with the author herself.

RSVP at wolfeinstitute@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

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Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program Archives - ������Ƶ