GIRI Spring 2023 Capstone with Dr. Michele Elam

Join us for the capstone event for the Spring 2023 cohort of our Global Inequality Research Initiative.

The agenda is as follows:

5:30-6:00PM: Welcome + Cocktails

6:00-7:30PM: Formal Program featuring student speaker and keynote speaker Dr. Michele Elam of Stanford University.

7:30-8:30PM: Reception

Throughout the spring semester, GIRI students have interrogate dthe life and work of James Baldwin as an entry point into deeper understanding of global inequality. Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was an essayist, novelist, playwright, and activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States as well as liberation movements around the world. In addition to readings about Baldwin, the context of global inequality during his productive years, and the ongoing legacy of his work in humanities and social science inequality research, the course has drawn upon a recent publication from Jamie McGhee and Adam Hollowell, You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge (Broadleaf Books, 2022).

About our Keynote Speaker

Dr. Michele Elam is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities in the English Department at Stanford University, a Faculty Associate Director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence https://hai.stanford.edu, a Race & Technology Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity https://ccsre.stanford.edu/race-technology-initiative, and Faculty Affiliate at both the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. She is former Director of African & African American Studies at Stanford and of Stanford’s oldest interdisciplinary graduate program, Modern Thought & Literature.

Her research in interdisciplinary humanities bridges literature, social sciences, and STEM in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race, with a particular concern for the ways racial perception and representation impacts outcomes for health, wealth and social justice. Currently working on a book titled “Making Race in the Age of AI,” Elam most recent scholarship focuses on humanities and arts as key crucibles for the many urgent questions about new socially transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence systems.

Elam’s books include Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford University Press, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has published widely on race and culture including articles in PMLA, African American Review, American Literature, Theatre Journal, Genre, Daedelus: The Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in several edited volumes including Feminist AI. Her op-eds appear in CNN, Huffington Post, and Boston Review. She was awarded the 2018 Darwin T. Turner Award for Outstanding Scholarship by the African American Literature and Culture Society.

At Stanford, she has served as the Director of the interdisciplinary graduate Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), the Director of African & African American Studies, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department. Nationally, Elam has served as Chair of the Executive Committee for the Black Literatures & Culture Division of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and on the Executive Council for the American Literature Society at MLA.