Swarthmore scholar to discuss performing identity

?Starting from Black: Performing Identity on Today?s College Campus? is the title of a talk to be given by Sarah S. Willie of Swarthmore College at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17, at Skidmore. Free and open to the public, the discussion begins at 7:30 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

An authority on African-American culture, politics, and literature, Willie is the author of Acting Black: College, Identity and the Performance of Race (Routledge 2003), a study of college-educated African Americans in the post-civil rights movement era. At Swarthmore, where she is associate provost and associate professor of sociology, she teaches courses on African-American culture and politics. Her research explores minority/majority and subordinate/superior relations, the construction of knowledge, and the subversion of oppression.

An exchange student at Spelman College in 1984, Willie graduated from Haverford College in 1986 and received a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1995.

Sponsors of her Skidmore visit are the Intercultural and Global Understanding Task Force, Dean of Faculty, First-Year Experience, Honors Forum, Student Affairs, HEOP/AOP, the departments of History, Education, and Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work; and the Black Faculty and Staff Group.