Dr. Sami Schalk, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will deliver the keynote address for the fifth annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium, held on the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus from March 21-23, 2024.

Drawing from her latest book, Black Disability Politics, Schalk will detail the Black Panther Party’s involvement in the 1977 504 Sit-in and discuss it as a historical example of how Black cultural workers have engaged with disability as a political issue in ways that have sometimes been obscured in Black studies and disability studies alike.

The entire Hopkins community is invited to attend the keynote address, to be held in Hodson 110 on Friday, March 22, from 5:00 to 6:30 pm.

The reception following the talk, and the Saturday morning book signing with Dr. Schalk, are open to registered conference guests only. To register for the conference, please visit the conference website. Registered guests have access to all conference sessions and events, including a welcome reception at the Baltimore Museum of Art on Thursday, March 21.

The Macksey Symposium invites more than 170 undergraduate students from institutions across the U.S. to present their humanities research in panels that span topics in literary analysis; media critique; gender and sexuality studies; philosophy; the history of medicine, science, and technology; international politics; religious studies; the history of museums and of educational institutions; and more. For a full conference program, please visit the conference website.