2009 Schedule
Thursday, October 29
7:30 - 9:00 p.m. Performance
- Performance of John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom by George Wolf Reily and Norman Thomas Marshall
Norman Thomas Marshall (Actor/Playwright)
Introduction by Larry Lawrence, The John Brown Society
Friday, October 30
8:30 - 9:00 a.m. Coffee and Registration
9:00 - 9:15 a.m. Welcome Remarks
9:15 - 10:30 a.m. Keynote Address
- W. Fitzhugh Brundage, UNC-Chapel Hill
John Brown: The Stone in the Historian’s Shoe
10:30 - 11:00 a.m. Coffee Break
11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Panel 1: John Brown: A Problem in Biography
- David Reynolds, City University of New York, Baruch College
How I Wrote John Brown, Abolitionist: A Cultural Biography - Evan Carton, The University of Texas at Austin
The Word and the Life: John Brown as Reader - Robert Blakeslee Gilpin,Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill
The Wind and the Whirlwind: Can Biography Explain John Brown? - Louis A. DeCaro Jr., Nyack/Alliance Theological Seminary
The Old Man and the “DuBoisian Century”? Meditation and Speculation on the Direction of John Brown Biography in the 21st Century - Moderator: David W. Blight, Yale University
1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Lunch
2:30 - 5:00 p.m. Panel 2: John Brown and the Arts
- Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, University of Pennsylvania
John Brown Embodied: An Afterlife in American Visual Culture - Franny Nudelman, Carleton University
John Brown, Martin Luther King, and the Art of “Creative Suffering” - Kirke Mechem, Composer
John Brown: The Opera - Robert Stepto, Yale University
John Brown in the Visual Art of Hovenden, Lawrence and Pippin - Moderator: David W. Blight, Yale University
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31
9:00 - 9:30 a.m. Coffee and Registration
9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Panel 3: John Brown and the Legacies of Violence
- Beverly Gage, Yale University
Was John Brown a Terrorist? - David Rapoport, UCLA
Mob Violence - Kay Wright Lewis, Rutgers University
Considerations on the Rhetoric of Race War in the Antebellum South and John Brown - Caleb Smith, Yale University
John Brown, Justice, and the Public Sphere - Moderator: David W. Blight, Yale University
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 - 3:00 p.m. Panel 4: John Brown and Abolitionism
- John Stauffer, Harvard University
‘I’ll be John Browned’: Abolition in the Southern Imagination - Richard Blackett, Vanderbilt University
John Brown and the Tradition of Attacking Slavery at the Source - W. Caleb McDaniel, Rice University
William Lloyd Garrison, Nonviolent Abolitionists, and John Brown - Wendy Hamand Venet, Georgia State University
John Brown, Female Abolitionists, and Rights for Women: A Mixed Legacy - Moderator: David W. Blight, Yale University
3:00 - 3:15 p.m. Coffee break
3:15 - 4:30 p.m. Concluding Roundtable: John Brown: A Problem for Our Own Time
- Russell Banks, Author
- Tony Horwitz, Author
- Moderator: David W. Blight, Yale University