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W.E.B. Du Bois Center Created At UMass Amherst Libraries
NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 2/25/09
CONTACT: LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATIONS ASST., (413) 545-0162
W.E.B. DU BOIS CENTER
CREATED AT UMASS AMHERST LIBRARIES
Amherst, MA - On Thursday, February 26, at 6:30 p.m., the UMass Amherst Libraries will host the 15th Annual Du Bois Lecture in the Special Collections Reading Room, Floor 25, Du Bois Library. In addition to the talk by Howard Dodson, Chief of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Libraries will officially announce that the UMass Amherst Faculty Senate has approved the creation of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center. W.E.B. Du Bois was a scholar and an activist, and instrumental in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The Du Bois Center will promote scholarship and public engagement with the wide range of issues in social and racial justice central to the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. Disseminating its work through fellowships, colloquia/seminars, print and electronic publications, and other educational initiatives, the Center will be the basis for ongoing intellectual interchange within an extensive community of scholars, activists, and the public at large.
The Center will be associated with the Special Collections and University Archives Department of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, and will bring together the great intellectual and material assets related to Du Bois at UMass Amherst: as steward of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers in Special Collections, as custodian of the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington, MA, and as home to a distinguished group of scholars in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.
For more information, contact Rob Cox, Interim Director of Du Bois Center and Head of Special Collections and University Archives, at 545-6842, or rscox@library.umass.edu.
Last Edited: 25 February 2009
