Visiting Scholar Dr. Myron M Beasley, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Bates College (Lewiston, Maine), will present a university-wide lecture entitled Eschewing Boundaries: Transdisciplinarity as Pathways to Critical Thought and Praxis, November 1, 6pm, in McMaster College, Rm. 214.  

The lecture is supported by a Visiting Scholar's Provost Grant recently awarded to Associate Professors Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis of the Department of Theatre and Dance, and Professor Naomi Falk of the School of Visual Art and Design.  The grant and lecture are tied to the professors' work in creating a new collaborative arts seminar course entitled Reciting Sites, to be offered at the UofSC in Fall 2019. 

As explained by Wideman-Davis, "The course will explore memories and sites, and interrogate race, gender, and class through artistic and creative expression. This potential course will examine performance in the context of localities, and localities in the context of performance. It will interrogate the ways in which the personal meets the political in geographies of enactment." 

"We will ask the following historical and theoretical questions: What role do monuments and memorials play in societies? What is the politics of memorialization? And perhaps more probing, this seminar will be interested in the intersection of such monuments and how the individual 'reads' them and/or recites them in daily life."

Myron Beasley, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of American Studies and serves on the committee of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. His ethnographic research includes exploring the intersection of cultural politics, material culture, and social change. He has been awarded fellowships and grants by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and most recently the Ruth Landes Award from the Reed Foundation.