Maryemma Graham, Inaugural Provost's Visiting Scholar, Gives Two Public Talks

The College of Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce the arrival of Dr. Maryemma Graham as part of the inaugural class of Provost’s Visiting Scholars.

Graham, a pre-eminent scholar of African American literature and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, will visit from Feb. 26 to March 9.

Graham is the world’s leading scholar of Margaret Walker, a poet, novelist and leader of the Chicago Black Renaissance. Graham has founded three important initiatives at the University of Kansas: The Project on the History of Black Writing, the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project and the Language Matters National Teaching Initiative. Graham has received more than seven National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $800,000. The Department of English will host her during her visit.

She will give two public talks during her stay. The first, “Margaret Walker and the Emancipation of Black Womanhood: From Theory to Practice,” is scheduled on Thursday, March 1 at 1 p.m. in the Speaker’s Auditorium in Student Center East. Graham will place Walker’s work within a feminist and womanist context.

Graham’s second talk, “Engaging Scholarship in a Predatory Environment,” will be part of the Social Justice and Democracy series at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She will speak about strategies to increase attention to social injustice in a college setting, including the growing problem of food insecurity.

As a Provost’s Visiting Scholar, Graham will teach undergraduate and graduate students in Southern literature and African American literature and consult with faculty and students about archival research, digital humanities and grant writing.

The Provost’s Visiting Scholar program brings to Georgia State promising and leading faculty from underrepresented minority groups for short-term visits. It enriches the intellectual life of the campus.

Learn more about Graham’s literary talk and register to attend here. Learn more and register for her social democracy talk here.