Fall 2021: Nicole R. Fleetwood
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood wrote the book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, part of which is featured in a chapter of the Fall 2021 CLAS Reads book selection, Racism in America.
Racism in America, edited by Annette Gordon-Reed, includes a variety of essays that examine the ways in which African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples have been and continue to be victimized in this country. The perspectives offered in these essays are especially important in that, as Gordon-Reed argues in her introduction, we are living in a “punctuation point” in history that holds the promise of bringing about real social change.
Nicole Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism, and the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' (2021). She is also the curator of the exhibition Marking Time at MoMA PS1. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).
Nicole Fleetwood is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. She has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Worth Rises.
Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Past CLAS Reads Authors
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore, a Professor of American History at Harvard University, gave a Zoom presentation at Lesley in the fall of 2020 on her book, that year's CLAS Reads selection, "This America: The Case for the Nation." (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University)
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigenous woman and environmentalist author and professor, visited Lesley in the fall of 2019 to discuss her book, the CLAS Reads selection for that year, "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants."
Suzy Hansen
Author and foreign correspondent Suzy Hansen presented at Lesley in the fall of 2018 on her book, "Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.”
Why We Write
- This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore, Fall 2020
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Fall 2019
- Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen, Fall 2018
- Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice by Bell Hooks, Fall 2017
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Fall 2016
- Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home by Anita Hill, Fall 2015
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Fall 2014