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Speakers

Julius Fleming

Dr. Julius Fleming, Jr. is an Associate Professor of English at the ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ of Maryland, College Park, where he also serves as Director of the English Honors Program. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (2022), published by New York ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ Press, and has begun work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production.

Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo, he is currently serving as Associate Editor of Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute.

Melissa Anyiwo

Melissa Anyiwo, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History. She received a B.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies and Politics from ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ of Wales Swansea in the United Kingdom before coming to the United States.  Her dissertation provided an analysis of the lifecycles of the dominant stereotypes of African American women—the Jezebel and the Mammy.  She has served as an Assistant Professor of History at the ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she also held the HH Battle Professorship in African American Studies and served as Coordinator of Black Studies Minor.  In 2007, she took a position at Curry College where she was promoted to Full Professor and served as Coordinator of the Black Studies Minor. In 2020 she received an NEH: Humanities Initiatives Grant to fund an Immersive Black History Project.

Glynis Johns

Glynis Johns is the founder and CEO of Black Scranton Project, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, local heritage initiative, and public history venture dedicated to archiving and celebrating the Black history of Scranton and Northeastern Pennsylvania. Glynis dedicates much of her time studying 19th and 20th century African American history. A native Scrantonian, local historian, sociologist, artist, documentarian, and advocate; Glynis's research focuses primarily on Scranton to piece together narratives of the black community. She received her BA and MA in sociology at St. John’s ÐÓ°ÉÔ­°æ.