VCU hosts annual lecture in ‘Media Art & Text’

By Cheryle Rodriguez

Katherine Bassard, Ph.D., chair of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English, will speak about opportunities and challenges in researching African American literature, history and culture during the university’s second annual Cornis-Pope Lecture in Media Art & Text.

Bassard will speak on Friday, Sept. 13, at 3 p.m. at the Scott House, 909 W. Franklin St., with a reception to follow. This event is free and open to the public.

The Cornis-Pope Lecture in Media Art & Text is a faculty lecture series hosted by VCU’s interdisciplinary program in Media Art & Text (MATX).The lecture series honors Marcel Cornis-Pope, Ph.D., professor of English, the MATX program's founding director and an internationally recognized scholar in literary theory and modern and postmodern literature.

Bassard’s lecture, "Chosen Stories: Writing, Race and the Archives," will reflect on her research in early African American literature and family history and the archival challenges of those projects. To be an African American scholar is to confront the archives as a site of hope and betrayal, memory and longing. Special attention will be paid to the promise and limitations of digital archives in African American history and culture and the role of black genealogy in popular media.

MATX is a joint endeavor of the School of the Arts and the School of Mass Communications and the Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences. The program emphasizes the historical and theoretical foundations essential to the scholarly study of media, both old and new, broadly defined.

For more information, visit http://www.matx.vcu.edu.