Dr. Ken Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, will deliver the lecture “Rethinking Race and Social Construction: A View from the Humanities” at 6 p.m. Monday, February 27, in Schroeder Hall, room 244, as part of events for Black History Month at Illinois State University.
Warren’s keynote address, sponsored by the Department of History and African American Studies, is free and open to the public.
The lecture will focus on how the concept of race as a social construction has become a consensus view across the many academic disciplines that address human variety and diversity. More often than not, however, the concept of social construction has not appreciably changed the way that references to race have functioned in discussions of human difference. In his lecture, Warren will explore literary study as a means to understand why this has been the case.
Warren joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1991. The author of three books, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism; So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism; and What Was African American Literature, he is also the coeditor of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Material and Intellectual Foundations of African American Thought, Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs. Warren has also edited and written an introduction to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for the August 2022 Norton Library series. His book A Critical Edition of Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio is forthcoming from West Virginia University press in 2023.
Currently serving on the editorial boards of American Literary History (ALH) and nonsite.org, Warren has recently been appointed to the editorial board of Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ). He has served on the boards of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance and the Du Sable Museum of African American History. He is currently a member of the Board of the Seminary Cooperative Bookstores, on which he served as president for two years, and the Board of Governors of the School of the Art Institute. In 2020 he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury for Fiction.
Warren has had a long history with the Newberry Library. He has served on both short-term and long-term fellowship advisory panels, has given several presentations for the Newberry Teachers as Scholars and the Newberry Teachers’ Consortium Seminars. He was a presenter for “The Language of Bronzeville” program as part of the Newberry’s prize-winning series, “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots.” For the last five years he has co-convened the Newberry’s American Literature Seminar.
For more information, contact Dr. Touré Reed at tfreed@ilstu.edu.
