Casting a Vision in Troubled Times:
Learning From The Black Intellectual Tradition
Angel Adams Parham, PhD Sociology, UVA.
Monday, September 23, 7:00
Scholé House, 819 S. Cathedral Place, VCU
Many sense that the social and cultural foundations of their societies have been shaken. In many wealthy Western countries, we seem to lack a shared vision of the good life and a shared vision of the good society. At the same time, our pluralist societies reject a faith-based vision of the good life and good society while classic foundations for cultivating such a vision are rejected as culturally or racially exclusive (eg. philosophical and literary resources of the Western canon). What is there to do? This is an invitation to “cast a vision” for the future by learning from writers of the Black intellectual tradition who addressed their own troubled times with innovative wisdom that wrested goodness and beauty out of seemingly endless darkness and discord.
Angel Adams Parham is Associate Professor of Sociology, senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and Associate Director for the major in Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia. Through her research in historical sociology, she engages in inquiry that examines the past in order to better understand how to live well in the present and envision wisely for the future. Her first book, American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017), received several awards. Her latest book, co-authored with Anika Prather, was published in 2022 and is entitled The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. Parham has published articles on the intersection of Black writers and classical liberal education in popular outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Public Discourse, and Common Good Magazine. Her work finds expression in the community in her capacity as the co-founder and executive director of Nyansa Classical Community, an educational organization which provides curricula and programming designed to connect with students from diverse backgrounds, inviting them to take part in the Great Conversation, cultivate the moral imagination, and pursue truth, goodness, and beauty. Parham has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and completed her doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.