Registration
Registration for the 2025 Macksey Symposium will be open from January 2 through January 31, 2025.
All attendees are required to register for the conference in order to gain access to the presentation sessions and receptions. Registered presenters and guests must wear their badge (provided at conference check-in) at all times during the conference.
Presenter Registration
If you have been accepted to present at the Macksey Symposium, please log in to the application portal and complete your registration payment by January 31, 2025.
Conference registration for presenters includes access to all receptions, events, and presentation sessions for the entire symposium, plus a swag bag and an invitation to publish in the Macksey Journal. Please see draft schedule below for more information about what is included.
Guest Registration
Those attending the symposium as a supporter (not presenting) have the option to purchase a one-day or a two-day pass at a discounted rate. All guest passes (both one-day and two-day) include access to the welcome reception on Thursday evening. Non-presenting guests may register beginning on January 2, 2025, using the Guest Registration portal. Please note, presenters may NOT use this link to register for the conference.
Advance registration is mandatory for all guests. Any unregistered guests who arrive at the conference will be turned away. Guest registration will remain open until we reach venue capacity. It is highly recommended that all guests register by January 31 in order to guarantee a spot.
2025 Registration Costs
For presenters:
- $150 by January 15 for early registration
- $175 by January 31 for regular registration
For guests (not presenting at the conference):
- Friday pass: $85 (includes breakfast, lunch, all Friday presentation sessions, keynote address, and keynote reception)
- Saturday pass: $50 (includes breakfast, lunch, book signing, and all Saturday presentation sessions)
- Two-day pass (for both Friday and Saturday): $120 (includes breakfast and lunch both days, all presentation sessions, keynote address, keynote reception, and book signing)
Travel and Accommodations
Participants are responsible for their own travel to and from Baltimore. All presenters are asked to reserve a room in the conference hotel, the Inn at the Colonnade, using the link below to access the discounted block rate. The Inn at the Colonnade is located directly across the street from the Johns Hopkins University campus, which serves as the venue for the symposium. A mobility shuttle will be available for those with accessibility needs.
- Rooms are $179/night and are available in both single-occupancy (one king bed) and double-occupancy (two queen beds), while supplies last.
We recommend that if you are flying you arrive at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI). For train travel, we recommend arriving at Baltimore Penn Station. Transportation is not provided to/from the airport or train station; however, public transit options are available.
Keynote Speaker
The keynote speaker for the 2025 Macksey Symposium is Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr., Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Fleming will deliver the keynote address, entitled “Black Performance, Activism, and the Persistence of Crisis,” on Friday, March 21st, at 5:00 pm.
Drawing from Dr. Fleming’s award-winning book, Black Patience (NYU Press, 2022), this talk will reexamine the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater, revealing how Black artists and activists used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. Illuminating the vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, Fleming will demonstrate the ways in which theater was not only a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production, but also a critical tool in the urgent pursuit of liberation.
Dr. Fleming will also be available for a book signing on Saturday, March 22, from 9:00 to 10:00 am.
About Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr.
Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr., is a specialist in Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, with particular interests in performance studies, Black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality.
Dr. Fleming earned a PhD in English, and a graduate certificate in Africana studies, from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Tougaloo College.
Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press 2022). This book argues that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and demonstrates how it was used to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” From slave castles to the hold of the slave ship, from the auction block to commands to “go slow” in fighting segregation, Black patience has aimed to deny Black freedom, to delay Black citizenship, and to cement the uneven distributions of power at the heart of modernity’s racial order. During the Civil Rights Movement, however, Black people’s demands for “freedom now” posed a radical challenge to Black patience. Analyzing a largely underexplored, transnational archive of black theater, this book shows that theater was central to these efforts.
Black Patience received the 2024 College Language Association Book Prize and the 2022 Hooks National Book Award. It also received Honorable Mentions for the John W. Frick Book Award and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and was a Finalist for the ATHE Outstanding Book Award, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award.
Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Having served as Associate Editor of both Callaloo and Black Perspectives—the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society—Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. He now serves on the Editorial Board of Southern Cultures.
Professor Fleming is currently at work on two new book projects: one that explores the relationship between the speculative and the new geographies of empire and colonialism and the other that examines the history of black nightlife.
About the Macksey keynote address
Every year, the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity at Johns Hopkins University invites a keynote speaker who is doing trailblazing work in the humanities to inspire the next generation of scholars to forge their own paths as humanities researchers.
Symposium Schedule
The tentative schedule for the 2025 symposium is as follows. Please note that this schedule is subject to change.
Thursday, March 20:
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm: Conference registration and welcome reception at the Baltimore Museum of Art (heavy hors d’oeuvres provided)
Friday, March 21:
8:30 am – 9:45 am: Breakfast and registration (breakfast provided)
9:45 am – 10:00 am: Opening remarks
10:10 am – 11:20 am: Session 1
11:35 am – 12:45 pm: Session 2
12:45 pm – 2:05 pm: Lunch and info sessions (boxed lunches provided)
2:05 pm – 3:15 pm: Session 3
3:30 pm – 4:40 pm: Session 4
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm: Keynote address by Dr. Julius Fleming
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm: Reception and meet-and-greet with keynote speaker (dinner provided)
Saturday, March 22:
8:30 am – 10:00 am: Breakfast and registration (breakfast provided)
9:00 am – 10:00 am: Book signing with Dr. Julius Fleming
10:10 am – 11:20 am: Session 5
11:35 am – 12:45 pm: Session 6
12:45 pm – 2:05 pm: Lunch and info sessions (boxed lunches provided)
2:05 pm – 3:15 pm: Session 7
3:30 pm – 4:40 pm: Session 8
4:45 pm – 5:00 pm: Closing remarks
Conference Program
Please click the button below to access the Conference Program from 2024, which includes a detailed schedule of events and an overview of the panels offered in each session. For a full list of presentations included in each panel, with titles and names of presenters and moderators, please click the Session Details button.
Presentation Tips
Your presentation should be 7-10 minutes long and should cover your original work in the humanities. The most common mode of professional academic presentation in many fields (such as literature and cultural studies) is reading aloud a short version of a research paper you’ve written, often accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. You should aim for a paper of about 1,200-1,500 words, but be sure to read it out loud and time yourself to make sure you’re under 10 minutes. Alternately, you may give a PowerPoint presentation and speak from notes or from memory.
You will be grouped with three other presenters working on similar themes, and after each of you has presented, there will be time for questions from the audience for all of the speakers in your session.