This workshop explores collective work on exhibiting evidence of underground railroad activities in Central and Western New York.
About this event
How do we research the underground railroad when evidence of its civil disobedience was frequently and deliberately hidden? In this workshop, we’ll examine the collective work of academic researchers and community partners to furnish and exhibit evidence of underground railroad activities in Central and Western New York.
Of the two approaches that inform the Cornell-Ithaca Underground Railroad Research Project, an archaeological excavation and critical fabulation, the workshop will concentrate on the writing, discussion, and showcasing of fictional approaches to experiences of traveling on the underground road.
Gerard Aching is W.E.B. DuBois Professor in the Humanities and professor of Africana and Romance Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean literatures and intellectual histories, theories of modernism and modernity in Latin America, and relations of literature, philosophy, and slavery in Plantation America. His most recent book is Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba (Indiana, 2015). His underground railroad research project, which entails public humanities and community-engaged field work in Central and Western New York, informs his new book project, The Promise of Rebirth: A Contemporary Approach to the Underground Railroad.
2023 NEPH Consortium
Along with the Bard Graduate Center, the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, and INCITE, OHMA is co-hosting the 2023 gathering of the Northeastern Public Humanities Consortium.
As part of the gathering, we are offering free, in-person workshops in the morning on Saturday, April 22 (our first in-person training workshops since 2020!) as well as a public panel on Friday, April 21, featuring INCITE's I See My Light Shining project. See and register for all public events here.