Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer from the Washington D.C. area. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. Michael has appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and has lectured to over 450 groups. He has served as a judge for the James Beard Awards and is a fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance and TED, and was the first Revolutionary in Residence at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Southern Living named him one of “Fifty People Changing the South and the Root.com added him to their 100 most influential African Americans under 45 – and as he says “Beyonce beat him out as number one!” He also made the Jewish Forwards list of most influential American Jews. HarperCollins released his book, The Cooking Gene, in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom – a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a third place winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writer’s Awards in Nonfiction. THE COOKING GENE WON the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, making him the first Black author so awarded. His piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit was included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award.
Sponsored by the Program in African American History
Supported, in part, by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Join Jasmine Smith, our African American History Specialist and Reference Librarian for a live collection review featuring items from our first ever Mellon Scholars on-line exhibition, Déjà Vu: We’ve Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics. Explore collections from the 18th and 19th century that document the long and chronicled history of medical racism from the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic to the present.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Thursday, February 11
2:30-3:30 p.m. EST
Led by Ainsley Wynn Eakins, Reading Room Assistant, Library Company of Philadelphia
Obeah was carried to the Caribbean through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but its spiritual, medicinal, and peacemaking properties became stigmatized through association with Black fugitivity and rebellion. This collection review will assess several of the Library Company’s obeah-related holdings to explore how this Afro-Caribbean tradition became racialized and criminalized in the colonial West Indies.
Sponsored by the Program in African American History
Wednesday, February 17
5:30-7 p.m. EST
A conversation with Sharon Block (UC Irvine), Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins), and Jessica Marie Johnson, author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Penn Press, 2020). Hosted by Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Program in African American History.
Offered via Fireside Chats
Sponsored by the Program in African American History
Supported by the Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History
According to suffragist Susan B. Anthony, bicycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Temperance activist Frances Willard learned to ride a bicycle at age 53, and then used bicycle riding as a metaphor for mastering life in the book she wrote about the experience. They were two of the many women who took up bicycling after the development of the modern Safety bicycle in the 1880s. Curator of Women’s History Cornelia King will present a range of material from the collections on the history of women and bicycling.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Bob Frishmen, Fellow of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors
Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program
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Women have been comparing women’s bodies to coral, and women’s labor to the act of reef-making, for centuries. What’s the thinking behind this analogy? In this talk, Michele Navakas will discuss a range of overlooked writings by 19th-century U.S. women who turned repeatedly to the process of coral formation to tell one another and their supporters how to build a better polity – one that expands by sustaining others, rather than displacing them.
Sponsored by The Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History
Michele Navakas, Associate Professor of English, Miami University of Ohio
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