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Feb. 22 UT Honors Symposium to Explore “Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era”

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On Thursday, Feb. 22, Dan Berger, who is an associate professor of comparative ethnic studies and U.S. history at The University of Washington Bothell, will discuss “Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era” as part of The University of Tampa’s Honors Program symposia series. Berger’s talk will begin at 4 p.m. in Reeves Theatre, located on the second floor of the Vaughn Center, and is free and open to the public.

Berger is the author or editor of six books, including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, which won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.Captive Nation documents the central role prisons played within the black freedom struggle between 1955 and 1980. He recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post’s “Made by History” blog about Florida prisons.

Other published books by Berger include Rethinking the American Prison Movement, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners and Mass Movements in the United Sates and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Berger was the editor of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism and Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out.

Berger is a faculty associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington, and he sits on the advisory or editorial board of the journals Abolition, Journal of Civil and Human Rights and The Sixties.

For more information about the event, contact Ryan Cragun, director of the Honors Program and associate professor of sociology, at [email protected], or Kacy Tillman, associate director of the Honors Program and associate professor of English, at [email protected].

Exonerated Death Row Inmate Juan Melendez to Speak at UT Honors Symposium April 13

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Imagine spending nearly two decades of your life on death row for a crime you didn’t commit. On Thursday, April 13, The University of Tampa Honors Program symposia series will welcome Juan Roberto Melendez, who will share his experience of being wrongly convicted and spending almost 18 years on Florida’s death row. His talk, titled “Presumed Guilty: Injustice, Survival and Hope on Death Row,” begins at 4 p.m. in the Crescent Club on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center and is free and open to the public.
In 1983, in a trial that lasted just a week, Melendez was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Delbert Baker. He spent 17 years, eight months and one day on Florida’s death row until the discovery of a taped confession of the real killer 16 years after his conviction. Upon his release on Jan. 3, 2002, he became the 99th death row prisoner in the U.S. to be released with evidence of innocence since 1973 (the number is currently 157).
During his talk, Melendez will highlight the myriad of problems he feels plague the death penalty system, including its high risk and inevitability of being imposed on the innocent, its unfair and unequal application on the basis of race and ethnicity and its almost exclusive imposition on our most defenseless and vulnerable members of society — the poor.
For more information, contact the Honors Program at (813) 257-3545 or [email protected].
The University of Tampa is a private, residential university located on 110 acres on the riverfront in downtown Tampa. Known for academic excellence, personal attention and real-world experience in its undergraduate and graduate programs, the University serves 8,310 students from 50 states and 140 countries. Approximately 65 percent of full-time students live on campus, and more than half of UT students are from Florida.

Jan. 27 UT Honors Symposium explores "Pirates, Sailors and Coastal Identities in Early America"

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Before watching the annual pirate invasion of Tampa at the Gasparilla Pirate Festival on Saturday, come by The University of Tampa on Friday, Jan. 27, to learn more about those who lived and worked on the sea during the “Golden Age of Sailing.” Beginning at 4 p.m., Dan Walden, an associate professor of English at Baylor University, will speak on “A Hell of Our Own — Pirates, Sailors and Coastal Identities in Early America.” The event, which is part of the Honors Program symposia series, will be held in the Trustees Board Room on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center and is free and open to the public.
During the “Golden Age of Sailing,” from the late-1500s to the mid-1800s, those who lived and worked on the sea often were men without country. Though sailing on English, French, Spanish, Dutch and, later, American ships, the men who sailed the ocean developed unique language, music and traditions — a culture of the sea. And when those “sea men” came to shore, they quite often found themselves at odds with the larger terrestrial national cultures that sought to control them. In response, there rose a small intermediate space between land and sea — the coast — that offered sailors, privateers and pirates a place to “make a Hell of their own.”
At Baylor, Walden teaches classes on early American literature and culture. His research, which focuses on the intersection of maritime and terrestrial culture in America during the Golden Age of Sailing, has been published in Early American Literature, Atlantic Studies, Studies in American Fiction, The Nautilus and Southern Literary Journal, among others. His current book project, Between Two Worlds: The Coast in Early American Literature, examines the representation and significance of coastal environments in American literature from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries.
For more information, contact the Honors Program at (813) 257-3545 or [email protected].
The University of Tampa is a private, residential university located on 110 acres on the riverfront in downtown Tampa. Known for academic excellence, personal attention and real-world experience in its undergraduate and graduate programs, the University serves 8,310 students from 50 states and 140 countries. Approximately 65 percent of full-time students live on campus, and more than half of UT students are from Florida.