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Smith eDigest
The Smith eDigest is sent to all campus email accounts on Tuesday and Thursday each week during the academic year and on Tuesdays during the summer. Items for eDigest are limited to official Smith business and must be submitted by 5 p.m. on the day prior to the next edition’s distribution.
Presidential Colloquium: Annette Gordon-Reed
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed—a historian known for her books “On Juneteenth” and “The Hemingses of Monticello”—will deliver a Presidential Colloquium on “The Struggle for Democracy in America: From the Founding Era to Our Own” at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 31.
The event, which takes place in Sweeney Concert Hall, is open to all with proof of vaccination. Masks are required, and members of the campus community should bring OneCards. Alternatively, members of the Smith community may log in to view a livestream at this link. (There is no public livestream.)
Gordon-Reed’s talk is part of Smith’s Year on Democracies.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the award-winning author of six books and a member of the faculty at Harvard University. The first African American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for history, for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” she is also the author of “On Juneteenth,” which sets out to capture the importance of the holiday to American history. Gordon-Reed’s honors include the National Humanities Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. A professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
In 2021-22, Smith College is hosting an ambitious set of programs and events under the organizing theme “Year on Democracies.” This collegewide initiative is an opportunity to examine democracies around the world, through every aspect of the college’s educational offerings: the curriculum, exhibitions, performances, lectures, special events and the work of its centers and institutes. Everyone in the Smith community is invited to participate and collaborate. Students, staff, faculty and alumnae are encouraged to share their ideas, so that the Year on Democracies is at once an intellectual pursuit and an opportunity for inspiration, progress and impact.
The Presidential Colloquium regularly features influential thought leaders in a wide range of fields—from poets and writers to economists and policy experts—to share their expertise, offer insights and inspire discourse on key social, political and global topics that call for our attention. Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin will conclude this year’s Presidential Colloquium series with an April 12 presentation on “Our Constitutional Inflection Point: Responses to Our Crisis of Democracy.”
