Extra Credit Opportunity for ENG/HUM Students: 19th Annual Black Women’s Conference (U of Kentucky, March 22 - 28)

[MB: attend one of these free events]

This Friday, March 22, 2013 begins the 19th Annual Black Women’s Conference. The theme this year is Voices of Resistance: Black Women and the Power of Song. The speakers are Dr. Renita Weems, Dr. Bettina Love, Dr. Judith Casselberry and UK’s own, Dr. Angelique Clay.

Schedule of Presentations:

Dr. Renita Weems: Call for the Weeping Women: Women, Resistance, and The Blues (12 pm, Student Center, 3/22)
Dr. Angelique Clay: Songs of Forgotten Voices: African-American Women Composers of American Art Songs (2 pm, Student Center 3/22)
Dr. Bettina Love: Black Girlhood, Hip Hop and the New South (3:30 pm, MLK Cultural Center, 3/27)
Dr. Judith Casselberry: The Amazon 35 Project: Race, Coalition Politics, and Lesbian Musical Culture (5:30 pm. Lyric Theater, 3/28).

The theme for this conference is unbound by discipline and time. The speakers were called on to use their intellectual and personal gifts to discuss the ways in which song, singing spaces, and places where black women gather to hum or moan have been powerful and necessary to the survival of black women. In the 19th year of the conference, we gather women/scholars/sisters/girlfriends and discuss the meaning, uses and importance of music in the lives of black women. We will discuss music from hip hop to gospel to folk to whatever moves and motivates people to keep on keeping on. The work and voices of these scholars draw from the wide span of black culture, history and spirituality.