Coffee with REAF, the University of Kansas, and the Leibniz ScienceCampus: Nishani Frazier and Randal Maurice Jelks
Coffee with REAF was started in May 2020 as an informal event to keep up conversations during the uncertain times of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are thrilled to be able to move this format out of the digital-only environment and use it to bring visiting researchers, faculty and students together.
When?Wednesday, 18 Jan 2023, 14:00
Where? SG 2.14 (CITAS/DIMAS office)
Coffee with REAF was started in May 2020 as an informal event to keep up conversations during the uncertain times of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are thrilled to be able to move this format out of the digital-only environment and use it to bring visiting researchers, faculty and students together.
About our guests
Nishani Frazier is Interim Director of Museum Studies and Associate Professor of American Studies and History at University of Kansas. Prior to University of Kansas, she held positions as Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton's advisory board on "One America".
Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, food studies, digital humanities, and black economic development. Nishani’s book publication, Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism, was released with an accompanying website also titled Harambee City.
Randal Maurice Jelks is Professor of African and African American Studies and American Studies at the University of Kansas. Jelks is an award-winning author, as well as a documentary film producer. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books as well as national blogs, journals, magazine and newspapers.
Jelks’s books are African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography, and Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali. Jelks has recently contributed to a collection of essays titled 42 Today: Jack Robinson and His Legacy edited by Michael Long published by New York University Press. And his latest book is Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America.
Workshop: Unfree Spaces in th Modern World: Resistant Responses - Empowering Acts
Nishani Frazier and Randal Maurice Jelks have been visiting professors in Regensburg in the past and we are thrilled to welcome them back. The reason for the visit is their participation in the international and interdisciplinary workshop “Unfree Spaces in the Modern World: Resistant Responses – Empowering Acts,” co-organized by Birgit Hebel-Bauridl and Sabine Koller for the Leibniz Science Campus Europe and America.