Program

3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Director's Roundtable and Q&A

• Matthew Gibson, Executive Director, Virginia Humanities
• Catherine Ingrassia, Dean, College of Humanities and Sciences
• Ana Edwards, Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies

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4:00 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.

Break

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4:15 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.

Residential Fellows Spotlight

• Michael Dickinson, Associate Professor, Department of History
• Carolyn Eastman, Professor, Department of History
• Shermaine Jones, Associate Professor, Department of English
• Tori Tucker, interdisciplinary scholar and palliative care nurse, VCU Health System

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4:45 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

HRC Awards Ceremony

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5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Reception

About the Speakers

Director's Roundtable

Matthew Gibson is Executive Director of Virginia Humanities, where he created and helped endow Encyclopedia Virginia, a free and reliable multimedia resource that tells the inclusive story of Virginia for students, teachers, and communities who seek to understand how the past informs the present and the future. He received his PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2005. His dissertation focused on the production of White vigilante narratives in popular American fiction from the novels of Thomas Dixon to the 2004 creation of the Minuteman Project along the Southwest border of the United States.

Catherine Ingrassia is Dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. An experienced academic administrator, Dean Ingrassia has a demonstrated history of working in higher education, leading interdisciplinary initiatives, and initiating curricular change. The author or editor of seven books, Ingrassia's most recent monograph, Domestic Captivity, was published by University of Virginia Press in 2022.

Ana Edwards is a public historian and assistant professor in VCU’s Department of African American Studies. As founding chair of the Defenders’ Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project (2004), and in collaboration with other community organizations, she contributed to the popularization of Gabriel’s Rebellion, reclamation of Richmond's first municipal African Burial Ground and helped lead the community campaign to establish a Memorial Park in Shockoe Bottom–a 10-acre area that was central to the city’s role as the epicenter of the US domestic slave trade.

Fellows Roundtable

Michael Dickinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at VCU. His research examines free and enslaved Black life and labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was a VCU Humanities Research Center Residential Fellow in 2022. Dr. Dickinson’s book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic was published in 2022 and was awarded the Paul Lovejoy Book Prize for excellence in slavery scholarship.

Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at VCU and the author of the prizewinning books A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution and The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. She is developing a book on Black and white New Yorkers’ experiences with the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, seeking to understand how they experienced those epidemics and how the disease changed the city.

Shermaine Jone is an Associate Professor of African American Literature in the English Department at VCU. Her research is concerned with Blackness, the politics of mourning, and antiracist pedagogy. Her publications include, “I CAN’T BREATHE!” Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric in South Journal; and “Unbounded Grief”: Black Maternal Sorrow and the Literature of Slavery” in Gender in American Literature and Culture Anthology, Cambridge University Press and “Breath-taking Pedagogy: Self-care & Ethical Pedagogy in the Climate of Anti-Blackness and COVID-19” in Radical Teacher. She is currently working on a book project entitled “Breath-taking Pedagogy: Urgent Teaching Practices in a Time of Precarious Breath.”

Victoria Tucker is an interdisciplinary scholar and palliative care nurse whose research engages the history of nursing and health care; race and education in the South; and public history. She uses oral histories to examine the important but largely unchronicled moment at the intersection of American and nursing history; the experiences and contributions of Black nurses in Virginia during the transition from segregation to desegregation. Tucker was an HRC Residential Fellow in 2023-24, and is currently a member of the HRC Health Humanities Lab.