Reckford Lecture with Magdalena J. Zaborowska

Magdalena J. Zaborowska will deliver the 2022 Mary Stevens Reckford Lecture in European Studies on Feb. 24, 2022.

Her lecture is titled, “‘Between Home, Blackness, and Me:’ Unsettling Locations, Lives, and Archives in American Literary Studies” and will be held on Zoom. Registration is required.

Zaborowska is a professor of African American and American literary and cultural studies at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her research includes literary and cultural studies and African American literature, with a particular emphasis on James Baldwin. Her book, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, received the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture and an Honorable Mention for the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theater Research. In 2018, Zaborowska published Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France, where she examines the themes of his works through the lens of his sprawling house in southern France.

The Reckford Lecture will see expanded programming along these themes, supporting by the IAH’s Race, Memory, and Reckoning Initiative.

Additional Reckford-related programming includes:

• A reading group organized by the Institute, the American Studies Department, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective on Zaborowska’s book, Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France
• Feb. 3: “In Baldwin’s House: Reckoning and Memory,” a public conversation with the reading group exploring themes of the book and their resonance today and in the work of African American, Indigenous and people of color and their contributions to Europe and beyond.
• Feb. 11: “Finding Baldwin: An Exploration of Belonging and Identity in Archives,” a workshop coordinated with University Libraries.

The Institute hosts the annual Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies, established in 1990 by UNC Classics Professor Kenneth J. Reckford to honor his wife, Mary Stevens Reckford. The Institute hosts the lecture in February, near to Mary’s birthday.

The lecture is designed to appeal to the public, rather than specialists. Speakers are asked to provide “pleasure, instruction, an interdisciplinary approach and a sense of shared humanity.”