KINGSTON, R.I. – Jan. 28, 2025 – The University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities will continue its year-long look at “Sustaining Democracy” this spring through the groundbreaking work of four guest speakers.

At a time of wide concern about challenges to democracy, the series showcases the vital role the arts and humanities play in interpreting and communicating threats to democracy and offering paths to democratic engagement. The spring speakers will focus on such issues confronting democracy as racism, censorship and the meaning of freedom. The lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is requested.

“We are excited to bring in four distinguished speakers whose work presents four very different perspectives on how the arts and humanities help sustain democracy and civic engagement,” said Evelyn Sterne, associate professor of history and director of the URI Center for the Humanities.

The spring lectures open Thursday, Feb. 13, with artist Eric Gottesman, the William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement at George Washington University. Gottesman’s presentation will focus on “Where Can We Go From Here?” at 5 p.m. in the Carothers Library’s Galanti Lounge. The lecture will also be livestreamed.

Gottesman’s work explores issues such as nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations, questioning accepted ideas of power and fostering critical self-reflection and creative expression. In his talk, he will discuss his collaborative work over the last 25 years, which has brought together photography, art, teaching and civic action.

A Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and Creative Capital and Aaron Siskind Foundation artist, he is the co-founder of For Freedoms, an artists’ collective that uses art as a catalyst for civic engagement and direction action, Sterne said.

“We’re really excited about his visit as he will discuss the ways in which the arts help to promote democracy and civic engagement,” said Sterne. “He is a distinguished artist and teacher, and his visit should be a fantastic opportunity for the arts community – at URI and beyond – to think about the role their work can play in engaging with and sustaining democracy.”

On Thursday, Feb. 27, historian Shannon King will discuss “The Politics of Safety: The Black Freedom Struggle,” at 5 p.m. in the Galanti Lounge. Focusing on research from his 2024 book, “The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York,” King will explore Black resistance to racial violence outside the South from the Great Depression to the 1990s and offer alternative ways to understand and teach African American history and Black social movements in the U.S.

A professor of history at Fairfield University, King is also the author of the widely acclaimed book “Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?” His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Reviews in American History. His essays have appeared in “Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement,” “The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North,” and “Escape from New York!”

Librarian and academic Emily Drabinski will provide insight into another important issue confronting democracy as she discusses attempts to censor and suppress stories and histories of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people. Her talk, “Libraries at the End of the World,” takes place Wednesday, March 19, at 4 p.m. in the Galanti Lounge.

“A healthy democracy depends on the free flow of ideas,” said Sterne, “and Drabinski’s talk will discuss how censorship threatens that exchange of information and how libraries stand at the center of the fight as they respond to these threats.”

Drabinski, a professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, is a past president of the American Library Association and edits the book series Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies.

The humanities center’s series closes with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie, whose work on labor, race and American democracy has been widely celebrated. His talk, “Freedom and Democracy,” will be Thursday, April 3, at 4 p.m. in the Hope Room of the Higgins Welcome Center.

Cowie won the Pulitzer in history for his most recent book, “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which explores threats to democracy by examining the history of white resistance to federal power that has promoted a view of freedom as the freedom to oppress others.

“Although Cowie’s book is based on the history of one county in Alabama, his work holds much broader implications for understanding conflicting notions of freedom,” Sterne said.

A noted academic, he served as the first House Professor and Dean of William Keeton House at Cornell University and is the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of such award-winning books as “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” and “Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor.”

Cowie’s presentation will coincide with the URI center’s annual spring humanities festival, which will include the presentation of the humanities achievement awards to an undergraduate and graduate student who have made strong contributions to the field of the humanities and URI, and have shown promise in a humanities-related career.