(Event Cancelled) The #MeToo Movement: The Legacy of Black Women's Testimonials
This event has been canceled and will be rescheduled.
Allyson Hobbs is the director of African and African American Studies at Stanford and an associate professor of history at Stanford University where she teaches American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth-century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She was honored by the Silicon Valley branch of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. She served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017.
She is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Root.com, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Hobbs’s first book, "A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life," published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. It won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history, among other accolades.
She is now at work on two books—one a history of Black women’s testimonials of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo, expanding upon her article for The New Yorker, "One Year of #MeToo: The Legacy of Black Women’s Testimonies"; and "Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights," which explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that Black motorists experienced on the road during the pre-Civil Rights era, at a time when the open road in an automobile symbolized the American dream.
Hobbs graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.
Professor Hobbs’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.