Program
Friday, May 29, 2026
09:00 - 09:15
Conference Welcome
TBA
09:30 - 10:45
PANEL 1: JULIE SAVILLE AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERVENTIONS/ METHOD
Moderator: Kelly King-O’Brien, Cornell University
Tessa Murphy, Syracuse University
“The Work of Reconstructing an Archive: A Social History of Slavery through Crown Colony Slave Registers”
SJ Zhang, The University of Chicago
“A Very Special Collection: Time Spent Reading and Teaching the Julie Saville Papers, 1960-2014”
Kai Parker, The University of Virginia
“‘The Quietest Millennial Tradition’: Julie Saville at the Intersection of Social History, Religious Studies, and Black Studies.”
11:00 - 12:15
PANEL 2: HISTORIES OF RACE AND THE UNIVERSITY
Moderator: Cathy Cohen, The University of Chicago
Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Tulane University
“The Work of Institutional History – Finding Black Lives in the Archives”
Guy Emerson Mount, Wake Forest University
“Reparations at UChicago: Social History, Julie Saville, and the Struggle over UChicago’s Ties to Slavery”
Sabine Cadeau, McGill University
“The Great New Building”: Reading the King’s College Gibb’s Building as a Key to Atlantic Slavery”
01:45 - 3:15
PANEL 3: WOMEN AND THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM(S)
Moderator: Paul Cheney, The University of Chicago
Johnhenry Gonzalez, The University of Cambridge
“Gautiche, Joutte, and Fanchette: Reconsidering the Haitian Revolution Through Microhistories of Three Elite Women”
Korey Garibaldi, The University of Notre Dame
“Keeping Up with the Gannibals”
Deirdre Lyons, The University of Chicago
“Rituals of Freedom: Freed Women’s Collective Action and the Second French Abolition”
Ashley J. Finigan-James, The University of Chicago
“Recreating Memory: A Historical Biography of Lucille Freeman Finigan and the National Council of Negro Women”
03:30 - 4:45
KEYNOTE:
Thavolia Glymph
Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Duke University
Keynote Address: “'liberty … and nothing shorter:' Freedom and The Work of Reconstructing Liberty"
Saturday, May 30, 2026
PANEL 4: RACE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE BLACK SUBJECT
09:00 - 10:30
Moderator: Leora Auslander, The University of Chicago
Darryl Heller, Indiana University
“Taney Was (Mostly) Right: Race and the Founding of a White Nation”
Caine Jordan, The University of Chicago
“The Berry Plan: Addiction, Public Health, and the Law in 1950s Chicago”
Toussaint Losier, University of Massachusetts
“‘We weren’t sensitive to new developments’: the Pontiac Brothers Defense Campaign and Revolutionary Black Nationalism at the Dawn of Mass Incarceration, 1979-1981”
Adrienne Monteith Petty, College of William and Mary
“‘Blended Spaces’: Gaining and Keeping Land in the Jim Crow South”
10:45 - 12:30
ROUNDTABLE: “IF YOU’RE NOT FIGHTING, YOU’RE NOT FREE”
Moderator: Adam Green, The University of Chicago
Joye Bowman, The University of Massachusetts
Steven Hahn, New York University
Thomas Holt, The University of Chicago
Lawrence Powell, Tulane University
Joseph Reidy, Howard University
Theresa Singleton, Syracuse University
Kenneth Warren, The University of Chicago
PANEL 5: AESTHETICS, RELIGION, AND FREEDOM(S)
02:00 - 03:30
Moderator: Dain Borges, The University of Chicago
Christopher Dingwall, Washington University in St. Louis
“The Work of Art and The Work of Reconstruction”
Alphonso F. Saville, Union Presbyterian Seminary
“Sacred Echoes in the Delta: Religion, Conjure, and the Afterlives of Slavery in the Mississippi Blues Tradition”
Kodi Roberts, Louisiana State University
“The Church of Cain: Pervasive Religion & The New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary at Angola”
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, The University of Chicago
“On the Visual Afterlives of Slavery (a mediation)”
CLOSING KEYNOTE
Barbara Fields
William R. Shephard Professor of History, Columbia University