Austin College is opening its annual Carlson Lecture to the community this evening, with University of Virginia sociologist Angel Parham speaking on the place of Black thinkers in the American founding tradition. Admission is free, and the public is welcome, the college said.
Parham's talk, titled "A Liberal Education for Life, Liberty, and Happiness: Black Intellectuals and Founding Ideals," starts at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, in Mabee Hall inside the Wright Campus Center. A reception begins at 4:30 p.m. The campus is at 900 N. Grand Ave. in Sherman.
About the speaker
Parham is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia and a senior fellow at the university's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her research focuses on the historical sociology of race.
Her 2017 Oxford book, "American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race," shared two 2018 honors: the Allan Sharlin Memorial award from the Social Science History Association, and the Barrington Moore award in comparative-historical sociology from the American Sociological Association.
She also writes about where the Black intellectual tradition meets the classics. With Anika Prather she co-wrote "The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature" (2022), and she is the founder of Nyansa Classical Community, which builds classical curricula and programs for students from varied backgrounds. Parham earned her bachelor's degree at Yale and completed doctoral studies at Wisconsin-Madison.
She has held a Fulbright grant and spent time in the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science in Princeton.
