Roderick Ferguson: “On the Subject of Roots: The Ancestor as Institutional Foundation”
Channel: WFU Humanities Institute
Date: 27/10/2020

On Tuesday, October 20th at 5:00pm, special online guest Roderick Ferguson presented the lecture “On the Subject of Roots: The Ancestor as Institutional Foundation” as a Zoom webinar.

Presented by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute and the Wake Forest University Slavery, Race and Memory Project. 

Professor Ferguson discussed how interdisciplinary fields, including Ethnic Studies and Queer Studies, are constituted by their negotiation with political power beyond the university and institutional power within it. As part of his talk, Professor Ferguson addressed Wake Forest’s present endeavors to research and document its racist past, including student and faculty activism, and he will speak to our present efforts to establish programs and centers of study on race and African American Studies. A panel of Wake Forest faculty — Kristina Gupta, Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; William Mosley, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities; and Corey D.B. Walker, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities — reflected on and responded to Professor Ferguson’s talk.