Forum History: The Twenties

September 14, 2021

Jodi Kantor is a best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter whose work reveals “hidden truths” about gender, power, economics, and politics in America. In 2017, Kantor and fellow reporter Megan Twohey broke the story about allegations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s against film mogul Harvey Weinstein. This work helped spark the #MeToo movement and, along with a team of reporters from The New York Times, earned Kantor the Pulitzer Prize for public service, journalism’s highest award. In 2019, Kantor and Twohey recounted their race to expose Weinstein in She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. A film based on this book is currently in the making. In addition to her reporting about sexual harassment and abuse, Kantor is well-known for writing about President Barack Obama’s personal and professional life in her 2012 book The Obamas.

October 12, 2021

William Sturkey is a historian whose scholarship examines race in the American South in the post-Civil War period. Sturkey is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, a sweeping biracial history of Hattiesburg during the Jim Crow era.  In 2020, Hattiesburg won the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize. Currently, Sturkey is working on a biography of the Vietnam War hero, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez.

William Sturkey is an associate professor at The University of North Carolina. He serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South and in 2020 he was awarded UNC’s Hettleman Prize for outstanding early career achievement. He received his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.  Prior to working at UNC, he was a visiting assistant professor at Southern Miss. Dr. Sturkey’s Forum address is co-sponsored by Twin Forks Rising Community Development Corporation.

November 2, 2021

David Wallace-Wells is a science journalist and a New York Times bestselling-author whose writing focuses on climate change, the impact it will have on our lives, and what we can do to mitigate the crisis. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times, GQ, the New Yorker, and Time magazine. An HBO Max series featuring a series of fictional stories about the world’s future inspired by The Uninhabitable Earth is currently in the works. Wallace-Wells is Deputy Editor at New York magazine, a regular contributor to New York and the Guardian, co-host of the podcast 2038, and a National Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is an alumnus of Brown University.

February 8, 2022

Sarah Lewis is an award-winning author and editor, as well as an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Master. Her work combines art history, race, photography, the story of America, and a deeply personal narrative to demonstrate how art can serve as a vehicle for social justice and cultural transformation.

March 22, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates, winner of the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Award, is a novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. Over 40 of her books have been featured on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Her most well-known works include A Garden of Earthly Delights, Blonde, The Falls, We Were the Mulvaneys, and them, the winner of the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. 

Oates’ Forum address was co-sponsored by Southern Miss’ Center for Writers and its journal, the Mississippi Review.

April 12, 2022

Karen L. Cox is a historian of Southern history and culture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a graduate of Southern Miss. Cox is the author of four books, including Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, winner of the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians. Her most recent work, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, explores the polarizing debates over “efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments.”

April 19, 2022

Xavier Foley is a celebrated musician and composer who uses his art as a tool to help promote social justice. His instrument of choice, the double bass, is rarely presented as a solo instrument; however, Foley was named to New York WQXR’s list of “19 for 19” Artists to Watch and featured on PBS Thirteen’s NYC-ARTs. He has performed as a concerto soloist with numerous orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Nashville Symphony. Foley’s composition for violin, bass, and string orchestra, “For Justice and Peace,” has been performed at Carnegie Hall.

Foley’s Forum address was co-sponsored by Southern Miss’ School of Music.

Religious Diversity and Mass Culture
September 13, 2022

Willow Wilson is an American writer best known for co-creating Kamala Khan, the first Muslim character to headline her own comic book. The new Ms. Marvel debuted in 2014, was a hit, and this summer Disney+ launched a critically acclaimed television series based on the comic. Wilson’s literary career took off in 2010 with the publication of Butterfly Mosque, an account of her conversion to Islam and life in Cairo, which the Seattle Times named the best non-fiction book of 2010. Since then, she has published two award-winning novels, The Bird King, named Amazon’s Best Book of the Month, and Alif the Unseen, winner of a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. In addition, she has collaborated on numerous graphic novels and comic series. 

Honor, Morality, and Revolution
October 11, 2022

Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks about how morality and identity shape our lives. He has written more than 20 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Lies That Bind. Cosmopolitanism argues against the view that the world is divided among warring creeds and cultures, emphasizing instead the powerful ties that connect people across religions and nations. The Lies That Bind challenges assumptions about how identities work, transforming the way we think about who and what “we” are. His most recent scholarship explores the moral life, the ways we think about religion, and the changing nature of work. In 2010 President Obama presented Appiah with the National Humanities Medal and in 2022 he was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Appiah is a Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and currently pens the “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Congressional Policymaking in a Fiercely Competitive Era
November 15, 2022

Frances Lee is a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. After graduating with honors from The University of Southern Mississippi in 1991, Lee completed a Ph.D. in political science at Vanderbilt University. Her work explores how the United States Congress works and how it often fails. Her 2016 book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, demonstrates that Congress is least effective when the parties are well balanced. She is the author of numerous other works including Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate and articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein claimed that Lee’s scholarship has “genuinely change[d] my understanding of how American politics works.” 

Data, Health, and Change
February 7, 2023

Talithia Williams, an associate professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, has degrees from Spelman College, Howard University, and Rice University. Her research involves creating statistical models that emphasize the spatial and temporal structure of data and applying these models to problems in the environment. She has worked at NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Security Agency and as a research partner to the World Health Organization, but she is best known for a TED talk, “Own Your Body’s Data,” which argues that simple data about our bodies can help us better understand our health. She is the author of Learning Statistics (2017) and Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics. Williams is also a co-host of the PBS NOVA series “NOVA Wonders,” and is the 2015 recipient of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching.

An Evening with Roxane Gay
March 21, 2023

Roxane Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and a widely followed social commentator. Bad Feminist, described by the Guardian as “a manual on how to be human,” is considered a quintessential study of modern feminism. It was followed by books such as Difficult Women, a collection of short stories, and Hunger, a memoir about food, weight, and Gay’s struggle to embrace a positive image of her body following childhood sexual abuse. Gay is the winner of two Lambda Literary awards, recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and was named on Queerty’s list of fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people." Gay was the first black woman to lead a Marvel title, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda. She is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, writes a newsletter, “The Audacity,” and hosts a podcast, “The Roxane Gay Agenda.”

Probable Impossibilities
April 18, 2023

Alan Lightman is an astrophysicist and writer of both non-fiction and fiction, whose work explores how we understand our place in the universe. In his scientific work, Lightman has made contributions to the theory of astrophysical processes under extreme temperatures and densities. In his philosophical works, he “aims,” as the New York Times said in a review of The Accidental Universe, “to ignite a sense of wonder in any reader who’s ever pondered the universe, our world, and the nature of human consciousness.” In his novels, he combines science and philosophy. Einstein’s Dreams, explores our relationship to time; The Diagnosis considers American’s obsession with information and speed; Mr g is the story of creation as narrated by God. His most recent book Probable Impossibilities is a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities of nothingness and infinity. He is a Professor of Practice of the Humanities at MIT, recipient of six honorary degrees, and winner of countless awards, both literary and scholarly.

The War for Kindness
September 12, 2023

Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, is best known for his 2019 book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Zaki’s research demonstrates that empathy is not a fixed trait, but rather a skill that can be strengthened through practice. In The War for Kindness he tells the stories of people fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. Jamil’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He is also known for a TED Talk, “We’re experiencing an empathy shortage, but we can fix it together.” Jamil Zaki’s Forum address is co-sponsored by the Luckyday Scholars Program.

An Evening with Representative Adam Kinzinger
October 10, 2023

Former U.S. Congressperson Adam Kinzinger witnessed the polarization of American politics firsthand. Kinzinger, an Air Force pilot who flew in both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and who remains an active member of the Air National Guard, served six terms in the House of Representatives. In Congress, he supported efforts to combat election disinformation, find employment for military veterans, lower taxes, curtail environmental legislation, and address the opioid epidemic. Following the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, Kinzinger was one of two Republicans who agreed to serve on the January 6th Committee that investigated the riot. Kinzinger’s autobiography titled Renegade: My Life in Faith, the Military, and Defending America from Trump's Attack on Democracy will be released in October 2023.

Biggest Resilience Challenge: Twenty-Year Strategy on Climate Change
November 14, 2023

An expert on U.S. energy policy, Jay Hakes has a long history of working on energy issues, including as Administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and as director for research and policy for President Obama’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission. He also served for thirteen years as the Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. Hakes, who earned a doctorate from Duke University and was a tenured professor at the University of New Orleans before entering government, is the author of numerous articles and two books: A Declaration of Energy Independence: How Freedom from Foreign Oil Can Improve National Security, Our Economy, and the Environment and Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Tough Choices in the 1970s.

True Tea with Kat Blaque
February 6, 2024

Kat Blaque is a transgender rights activist who speaks out on issues of social justice concerning race, gender, and the LGBTQ+ community. She is known for fostering conversations where survivors and victims’ alike can feel as though they have a voice, discussing white supremacy and how it’s impacted her own life, and advocating for self-acceptance in a world where trans people aren’t seen as valid. She playfully refers to herself as “intersectionality salad” as she embodies various identities and experiences. Blaque hosts a weekly show on her YouTube channel called “True Tea” where she answers questions sent to her by her followers. She currently contributes to Everyday Feminism, Pride.com, and the Huffington Post.

Alone with Kristen Radtke
March 19, 2024

Kristen Radtke is a writer and illustrator. Her 2021 nonfiction comic, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, was named a best book of the year by NPR, TIME Magazine, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, and The Los Angeles Times. Publishers Weekly described Radtke’s work as “innovative in form and painfully relevant in content.... For a treatise about the perils of being alone, it creates a wonderful sense of being drawn into conversation.” Seek You was awarded a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Radtke is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine and her comics have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and the Oxford American.

In Conversation with John Green
April 9, 2024

John Green is the acclaimed author of works of fiction including Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down as well as a collection of essays, The Anthropocene Reviewed, featuring detailed reviews of everything from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. His books have been translated into more than 55 languages and several have been adapted for film. Along with his brother, Green is also a prolific co-creator of many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. Green was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, is a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His charity, Project for Awesome, supports maternal health in Sierra Leone.