Forum History: The Twenties

September 14, 2021

Jodi Kantor is a best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter whose work reveals “hidden truths” about gender, power, economics, and politics in America. In 2017, Kantor and fellow reporter Megan Twohey broke the story about allegations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s against film mogul Harvey Weinstein. This work helped spark the #MeToo movement and, along with a team of reporters from The New York Times, earned Kantor the Pulitzer Prize for public service, journalism’s highest award. In 2019, Kantor and Twohey recounted their race to expose Weinstein in She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. A film based on this book is currently in the making. In addition to her reporting about sexual harassment and abuse, Kantor is well-known for writing about President Barack Obama’s personal and professional life in her 2012 book The Obamas.

October 12, 2021

William Sturkey is a historian whose scholarship examines race in the American South in the post-Civil War period. Sturkey is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, a sweeping biracial history of Hattiesburg during the Jim Crow era.  In 2020, Hattiesburg won the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize. Currently, Sturkey is working on a biography of the Vietnam War hero, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez.

William Sturkey is an associate professor at The University of North Carolina. He serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South and in 2020 he was awarded UNC’s Hettleman Prize for outstanding early career achievement. He received his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.  Prior to working at UNC, he was a visiting assistant professor at Southern Miss. Dr. Sturkey’s Forum address is co-sponsored by Twin Forks Rising Community Development Corporation.

November 2, 2021

David Wallace-Wells is a science journalist and a New York Times bestselling-author whose writing focuses on climate change, the impact it will have on our lives, and what we can do to mitigate the crisis. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times, GQ, the New Yorker, and Time magazine. An HBO Max series featuring a series of fictional stories about the world’s future inspired by The Uninhabitable Earth is currently in the works. Wallace-Wells is Deputy Editor at New York magazine, a regular contributor to New York and the Guardian, co-host of the podcast 2038, and a National Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is an alumnus of Brown University.

February 8, 2022

Sarah Lewis is an award-winning author and editor, as well as an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Master. Her work combines art history, race, photography, the story of America, and a deeply personal narrative to demonstrate how art can serve as a vehicle for social justice and cultural transformation.

March 22, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates, winner of the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Award, is a novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. Over 40 of her books have been featured on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Her most well-known works include A Garden of Earthly Delights, Blonde, The Falls, We Were the Mulvaneys, and them, the winner of the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. 

Oates’ Forum address was co-sponsored by Southern Miss’ Center for Writers and its journal, the Mississippi Review.

April 12, 2022

Karen L. Cox is a historian of Southern history and culture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a graduate of Southern Miss. Cox is the author of four books, including Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, winner of the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians. Her most recent work, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, explores the polarizing debates over “efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments.”

April 19, 2022

Xavier Foley is a celebrated musician and composer who uses his art as a tool to help promote social justice. His instrument of choice, the double bass, is rarely presented as a solo instrument; however, Foley was named to New York WQXR’s list of “19 for 19” Artists to Watch and featured on PBS Thirteen’s NYC-ARTs. He has performed as a concerto soloist with numerous orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Nashville Symphony. Foley’s composition for violin, bass, and string orchestra, “For Justice and Peace,” has been performed at Carnegie Hall.

Foley’s Forum address was co-sponsored by Southern Miss’ School of Music.

Religious Diversity and Mass Culture
September 13, 2022

Willow Wilson is an American writer best known for co-creating Kamala Khan, the first Muslim character to headline her own comic book. The new Ms. Marvel debuted in 2014, was a hit, and this summer Disney+ launched a critically acclaimed television series based on the comic. Wilson’s literary career took off in 2010 with the publication of Butterfly Mosque, an account of her conversion to Islam and life in Cairo, which the Seattle Times named the best non-fiction book of 2010. Since then, she has published two award-winning novels, The Bird King, named Amazon’s Best Book of the Month, and Alif the Unseen, winner of a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. In addition, she has collaborated on numerous graphic novels and comic series. 

Honor, Morality, and Revolution
October 11, 2022

Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks about how morality and identity shape our lives. He has written more than 20 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Lies That Bind. Cosmopolitanism argues against the view that the world is divided among warring creeds and cultures, emphasizing instead the powerful ties that connect people across religions and nations. The Lies That Bind challenges assumptions about how identities work, transforming the way we think about who and what “we” are. His most recent scholarship explores the moral life, the ways we think about religion, and the changing nature of work. In 2010 President Obama presented Appiah with the National Humanities Medal and in 2022 he was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Appiah is a Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and currently pens the “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Congressional Policymaking in a Fiercely Competitive Era
November 15, 2022

Frances Lee is a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. After graduating with honors from The University of Southern Mississippi in 1991, Lee completed a Ph.D. in political science at Vanderbilt University. Her work explores how the United States Congress works and how it often fails. Her 2016 book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, demonstrates that Congress is least effective when the parties are well balanced. She is the author of numerous other works including Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate and articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein claimed that Lee’s scholarship has “genuinely change[d] my understanding of how American politics works.” 

Data, Health, and Change
February 7, 2023

Talithia Williams, an associate professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, has degrees from Spelman College, Howard University, and Rice University. Her research involves creating statistical models that emphasize the spatial and temporal structure of data and applying these models to problems in the environment. She has worked at NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Security Agency and as a research partner to the World Health Organization, but she is best known for a TED talk, “Own Your Body’s Data,” which argues that simple data about our bodies can help us better understand our health. She is the author of Learning Statistics (2017) and Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics. Williams is also a co-host of the PBS NOVA series “NOVA Wonders,” and is the 2015 recipient of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching.

An Evening with Roxane Gay
March 21, 2023

Roxane Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and a widely followed social commentator. Bad Feminist, described by the Guardian as “a manual on how to be human,” is considered a quintessential study of modern feminism. It was followed by books such as Difficult Women, a collection of short stories, and Hunger, a memoir about food, weight, and Gay’s struggle to embrace a positive image of her body following childhood sexual abuse. Gay is the winner of two Lambda Literary awards, recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and was named on Queerty’s list of fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people." Gay was the first black woman to lead a Marvel title, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda. She is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, writes a newsletter, “The Audacity,” and hosts a podcast, “The Roxane Gay Agenda.”

Probable Impossibilities
April 18, 2023

Alan Lightman is an astrophysicist and writer of both non-fiction and fiction, whose work explores how we understand our place in the universe. In his scientific work, Lightman has made contributions to the theory of astrophysical processes under extreme temperatures and densities. In his philosophical works, he “aims,” as the New York Times said in a review of The Accidental Universe, “to ignite a sense of wonder in any reader who’s ever pondered the universe, our world, and the nature of human consciousness.” In his novels, he combines science and philosophy. Einstein’s Dreams, explores our relationship to time; The Diagnosis considers American’s obsession with information and speed; Mr g is the story of creation as narrated by God. His most recent book Probable Impossibilities is a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities of nothingness and infinity. He is a Professor of Practice of the Humanities at MIT, recipient of six honorary degrees, and winner of countless awards, both literary and scholarly.