Opening with a keynote by Patrice Rankine, Ph.D., on the evening of Oct. 6 (7 p.m., Albright Theatre), Albright College will host its fourth Empowering Albright Voices day on Oct. 7 – a full day of panels and activities that bring awareness to relevant social topics. All Empowering Albright Voices events are free and open to the public.
Empowering Albright Voices day participants are able to voice challenges of discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, accessibility, religious practices and more. Participants will openly discuss difficult topics and learn about people who are different from themselves, in an effort to cultivate an inclusive, thriving community.
Drawing from playwrights, poets and artists to illustrate how we might find resources to build shared meaning, Rankine will discuss tensions and challenges in building shared meaning within a diverse society.
A professor in classics at the University of Chicago, Rankine earned his BA in Ancient Greek from Brooklyn College, City University of New York City and his Ph.D. in classical languages and literatures from Yale University. Winner of an excellence in teaching award in the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University, Rankine researches the Greco-Roman classics and their afterlife, particularly as they pertain to literature, theater and the history and performance of race.
Rankine is an award-winning author, whose current book projects include “Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning, 1964-2020” and “Slavery and the Book.” His ongoing writing includes contributions to Queer Euripides and the Critical Ancient World Studies project, and he will coedit a volume on race, racism and the classics for Transactions of the American Philological Association. In addition to the reception of classics in current times, Rankine is interested in reading literature with the insights gained from various theoretical approaches, such as race and performance, queer theory and social history.
Learn more about Empowering Albright Voices day online and follow #EmpoweringAlbrightVoices on social media.
