Dr. Noelle Trent to present guest lecture on “Interpreting Difficult History: Public History in the 21st Century” Nov. 13 at Ouachita
November 03, 2017 - Katie Smith
Ouachita Baptist University will host Dr. Noelle Trent as she presents a guest lecture,
“Interpreting Difficult History: Public History in the 21st Century,” on Nov. 13 at
7:30 p.m. in Ouachita’s McBeth Recital Hall in Mabee Fine Arts Center. The lecture
is part of Ouachita’s Birkett Williams Endowed Lecture Series and is free and open
to the public.
Dr. Trent’s lecture will focus on past civil rights movements and use them as a lens
to understand today’s civil and human rights struggles. Trent serves as director of
interpretation, collections and education at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.
Her lecture will provide practical uses of studying history and public history today
and addressing the role social sciences can play in talking about social justice,
especially for students involved in Ouachita’s new social justice studies and public
history majors.
“We started talking about it the week or two before Charlottesville, and she was on
the list,” explained Dr. Myra Houser, assistant professor of history and coordinator
of Ouachita’s social justice studies program. “We thought that she would be fitting
just because of the current contemporary context. But then I think after Charlottesville
these issues have become a lot more relevant and more directly tied. Timing-wise,
I think it was very weird, and I think very sobering.”
An Aug. 12 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned
violent when a driver rammed his vehicle into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing
one person and injuring several others.
Houser noted that those attending Trent’s lecture will be able to gain some more insight
into today’s struggles, whether considering race, gender or even what it means to
be called an American in both theoretical and pragmatic senses. Trent also will share
how history still applies to the present and offer insights on beginning to solve
some current issues.
“I hope the lecture develops an appreciation of deeper study of the past, because
that is what we’re talking about, but also of human society in general, whether that’s
through a political lens or a contemporary-literary lens,” Houser added. “I think
that whether we’re talking about human rights or civil rights and however we construct
those, those are relevant to everybody, no matter what their major is.”
Trent earned her doctorate in American History at Howard University. Her dissertation,
“Frederick Douglass and the Making of American Exceptionalism,” examines how the noted
African-American abolitionist and activist influenced the development of the American
ideas of liberty, equality and individualism, which later coalesced to form the ideology
of American exceptionalism, according to the African-American Intellectual History
Society.
Trent is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has worked with several noted organizations
and projects, including the National Archives and Records Administration, the National
Park Service, Catherine B. Reynolds Civil War Washington Teacher Fellows, the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National
Museum of American History. She has presented papers and lectures at the American
Historical Association, Association for the Study of African American Life and History,
the Lincoln Forum and the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
Ouachita’s Birkett Williams lecture series was established in 1977 through a gift
from the late Birkett L. Williams, a 1910 Ouachita graduate. His generous endowment
established the lectures as an opportunity to extend the concepts of a liberal arts
education beyond the classroom by bringing renowned scholars and public figures to
Ouachita’s campus.
This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Dr. Randall
Wight, dean of Ouachita’s Sutton School of Social Sciences and professor of psychology
and biology, at [email protected].
By Katie Smith
November 3, 2017
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