Event Date
With a Welcome from Chancellor Gary S. May
Register here
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (Arts Emerson/ American Repertory Theater) and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her timely new book, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press, 2020) takes place in transitionary spaces—on airplanes, at a diversity training session, in a therapist’s office, at a dinner party, after a play, on the internet—where presumed neutrality gives way to American culture’s overwhelming whiteness. Rankine questions what it means to interrogate white privilege, liberal politics, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House, and much more. Revelatory, funny and ingeniously written, Just Us is about intimacy and friendship, and brings us into a necessary conversation about what we don’t know.
In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) and has received numerous awards, including the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry, and lives in New Haven, Conn.
This program is organized by Professor Allison Coudert, Paul A. and Marie Castelfranco Chair in the History of Religion; Professor Katie Peterson, director of the Creative Writing Program; and the Manetti Shrem Museum.
Co-sponsored by:
- Campus Community Relations (Campus Community Book Project and Diversity and Inclusion Education Program)
- Campus Council on Community and Diversity (CCC&D)
- Center for African Diaspora Student Success (CADSS)
- Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspective on Social Science, Arts, and Humanities (CAMPSSAH)
- Cultural Studies Graduate Group
- Department of African American & African Studies
- Department of American Studies
- Department of Art & Art History
- Department of Comparative Literature
- Department of English and Creative Writing Program
- Department of History
- Department of Political Science
- Department of Religious Studies
- Feminist Research Institute
- Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life
- Public Scholarship and Engagement
- Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center, School of Education
- UC Davis African Continuum
- UC Davis College of Letters and Science
- UC Davis Humanities Institute
- UC Davis Library
- UC Davis School of Law
- VC - Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (VC-DEI)