Historical Approaches to Black Studies: roundtable discussion
This event is free and open to the public; registration is mandatory via this link.
Featuring three scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, this Black History Month roundtable organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada will explore perspectives and approaches to Black Studies with a particular emphasis on its uniqueness in the Canadian context.
The roundtable will be followed by a Q&A and a reception.
David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (2018) and Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (2013, winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize). He is editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness (2018) and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (2009). He has produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon; and recently served as a consultant for the CBC television’s Black Life: Untold Stories documentary series. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and is a Lecturer in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Sarah Riley Case is an Assistant Professor at the McGill University Faculty of Law. Her research and teaching focus on slavery and the law, Critical Race Theory, Black life, colonialisms, arts, and the natural world. Before joining McGill, she was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy. She served as a Special Advisor to the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity.
Dr. Riley Case’s publications include Looking to the Horizon: The Meanings of Reparations for Unbearable Crises, To Protest for Black Life during the Pandemic: Resistance and Freedom in a Settler State, Homelands of Mary Ann Shadd, and “Thoughts of Liberation“ with Nataleah Hunter-Young in Canadian Art.
Dr. Riley Case collaborates with people working toward racial, regional, and ecological justice in the international system, academic communities, legal clinics, and across social movements, including by mixing law, history, ethics of daily living, and the arts.
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) is Assistant Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies, of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history and William Dawson Chair.
Dr. Adjetey is working on his second and third book projects on warfare and African-led abolitionism on the Gulf of Guinea Coast, and revolutionary Black organizing and state repression in the United States and Americas, respectively.
Dr. Adjetey’s first book is Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, Jan. 2023). For his teaching, Dr. Adjetey was awarded McGill University's H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
