The Illinois Humanities Council (IHC) will celebrate the graduation of The Odyssey Project‘s class of 2010. Professor Clarence E. Lang will give the keynote address.
The Odyssey Project is a free, eight-month program of college-level humanities courses for people living in poverty. Students in the class of 2010 took classes from August through April at the Douglass Branch Library in Champaign, Illinois.
Clarence E. Lang is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research areas are African American working-class history, the Black Freedom Movement, and the twentieth-century urban Midwest. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (University of Michigan Press 2009) and co-editor (with Robbie Lieberman) of Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story” (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). He has published articles in The Black Scholar, New Politics, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of African American History. A co-authored article with Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, titled “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” was co-winner of the 2009 EBSCOhost America: History and Life Award from the Organization of American Historians.
A reception will follow the ceremony.
This event is by invitation only.
For more information or an invitation, please call Amy Thomas Elder at 312.422.5580.