In the 21st century, attacks on the humanities and liberal arts education challenge the American university even as it faces unprecedented demographic challenges. Today’s event is organized by the U-M Ethnic Studies programs with the support of the Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities Initiative. Our goal in this series of conversations is to envisage diversity as an engine driving our teaching in support of all students.

Meet our Moderator: Magdalena J. Zaborowska is a professor for the Departments of American Culture & Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has taught and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Tulane University, Aarhus University in Denmark, University of Italy in Cagliari (Sardinia) and Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier in France. In addition to numerous articles and chapters published in the United States and Europe, her current book projects include “Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity” (forthcoming from Duke UP) and a monograph in progress on the proliferation of American notions of race and sexuality in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, Racing Borderlands. Currently, she is serving as the Chair to the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Meet our speakers:
Alan Rice is a Professor in English and American Studies at UCLan, Preston and co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR). His books include, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003), Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (2010) & (co-written) Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid (2019). He was a member of the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster from 2000-2007, co-curated Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery at the Whitworth Gallery in 2007 and has been involved in a variety of documentaries and dramas with the BBC and other arts and media companies including being consultant to Studio Canal for their 2022 release The Railway Children Return. In 2021 he curated the exhibition Lubaina Himid: Memorial to Zong and in 2023 co-curated Facing the Past: Black Lancastrians. Working with local Black History groups he has rolled out his Lancaster Slave Trade Tour and organised commemorations, supported by the Embassy of the United States, for the Battle of Bamber Bridge where African American soldiers in WW2 fought Jim Crow racism on British shores. In 2025 he is Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

Regina Marie Mills is Assistant Professor of Latinx and U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literature at Texas A&M University in the Department of English. Her work in AfroLatinx literary studies, U.S.-Central American literature, and games studies have appeared in Latino Studies, The Black Scholar, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, and several edited collections. Her first book, Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades (2024) is part of the “Latinx: The Future Is Now” series at the University of Texas Press.

Professor Sandra Gunning's interests include American Studies; 19th and 20th C. American literature; African American literature; African diaspora studies; interdisciplinary approaches to literature; feminism and gender studies; and travel writing. She has faculty appointments at the University of Michigan with the Department of American Culture, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), and Courtesy Appointments in the Department of English Language & Literature and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her field’s of study are 19th and 20th Century American Literature, Afro-American Literature, American women writers, and travel writing.