KEYNOTE AND DISCUSSION ON THURSDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 14:00-16:30

Matthew Guterl is a historian of the United States from the Civil War to the present, with extensive expertise in the history of race-relations, civil and human rights, and empire. He earned his BA from what was then called Stockton State College in 1993 (now Stockton University) and his PhD from Rutgers University in 1999.

Guterl is the author of five scholarly monographs: The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Harvard, 2001), American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders and the Age of Emancipation (Harvard, 2008), Seeing Race in Modern America (UNC, 2013), and Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard, 2014). Hotel Life (UNC, 2015), a critique of rentable private space, was co-authored with his collaborator, Caroline Levander. His memoir about growing up in a multiracial adoptive household, Skinfolk, was published in 2023 by Liveright, the literary imprint of Norton. 

He is presently working on a global biography of the queer, cosmopolitan, human rights activist, Roger Casement, soon to be published by Liveright. The book is tentatively titled: The Hanged Man: Roger Casement, the Great War, and the Human Rights Revolution.

Guterl has begun researching a new project on the 1970s, titled The Troubles, focusing on the connections and disjunctions, the parallels and divergencies of Black radical politics and "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Beyond uncovering the longer historic entanglements of Black/Irish radicalisms, the work will look at the specific conditions of that disastrous decade, illuminating the power of art and culture, and showcasing moments of solidarity, of discovery, and of disillusionment.

KEYNOTE AND DISCUSSION ON FRIDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 14:00-16:30

Jodi Skipper is a Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Skipper studies how Black pasts are represented in the present, and how historic preservation projects play a role in imagining more sustainable and healthy futures for U.S. southern communities. She earned a B.A. in History from Grambling State University (LA), a M.A. in Anthropology from Florida State University, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology, with a focus on African diaspora studies, from the University of Texas at Austin.

During her time at the University of Mississippi, she has worked with Behind the Big House, a slave dwelling interpretation program in Mississippi, which expanded to the state of Arkansas. In 2017, Skipper was awarded one of eight Whiting Foundation Public Humanities fellowships to help expand the program model. With that fellowship, she created behindthebighouse.org, a website designed to help make the program model more accessible to individuals and institutions thinking through how they might incorporate slavery into historic site narratives.

Her book Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South (University of Iowa Press) tells the story of a southern academic navigating life and a career in landscapes that honor the Confederacy while silencing slavery. The book is based on her collaboration with the Behind the Big House program in Mississippi.