February 23, 2023

7pm in McCue Auditorium, Liberal Arts Building


Imani Perry, PhD

Hughes-Rogers Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University

Dr. Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. She is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and a National Book Award winning author of creative nonfiction. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies. Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.

The lecture is sponsored by the Department of African and African-American Studies, Brockport Student Government, and the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

About the Lecture

The purpose of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Lecture is to bring a scholarly examination of some aspect of the African-American experience to Brockport and the surrounding community. Typically, the subject relates to King’s vision of the “beloved community,” in which all persons must be able to live harmoniously, brotherly, and sisterly. In our contemporary global village, this concept of the beloved community must necessarily be extended to include cultural, psycho-social, and intellectual diversities.

To this effect, the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Lecture series has invited to the Brockport campus activists, academicians, and public and private intellectuals to critically examine the meanings of the beloved community from their own eclectic backgrounds and proclivities.