2025 JWJI Distinguished Lecture

 

 

On Thursday, April 24th, in Emory's Atwood Chemistry Building, Room 360, Deborah E. McDowell delivered the 2025 Distinguished Lecture entitled, "I’ll Make Me a World: James Weldon Johnson and the Long Emancipation". 

 

Dr. McDowell is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies and former Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her influential work includes ‘The Changing Same’: Studies in Fiction by African-American Women, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, and The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration, co-edited with Juan Battle and Claudrena Harold.