Dr. Jelani Cobb, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, journalist, historian and journalism school dean, will be the keynote speaker for the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Communications and College of Information and Communications joint 2023 Media & Civil Rights History Symposium and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Research Symposium on March 30 and 31, 2023.
The in-person event will be held at the Hilton Columbia Center, a hotel just a few blocks from the University.
The biennial Media & Civil Rights History Symposium will also feature a day of research papers, panel sessions and presentations by the winners of the 2021 and 2023 Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History, which recognizes the best journal article or chapter in an edited collection on the historical relationship between the media and civil rights the previous two years. The panels and Farrar Award session will be livestreamed; research paper sessions will not be livestreamed.
The joint Media & Civil Rights History Symposium and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Research Symposium begins with Cobb’s keynote address on Thursday evening, March 30. Limited seating is available for symposium registrants; the keynote will be livestreamed.
Cobb became dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism in August 2022 and serves as the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism in the school since 2016. He is also a renowned journalist, writing for The New Yorker magazine since 2012, frequently addressing race, politics, history, and culture. In 2018, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He received the prestigious Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for a remarkable series of articles about race, injustice, and the police which he wrote for The New Yorker. He is also a recipient of the Walter Bernstein Award from the Writer’s Guild of America for his investigative series Policing the Police, which aired on PBS Frontline.
His recent books include Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He recently accepted a DuPont-Columbia Award on behalf of filmmaker Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary 13th – in which he was prominently featured as an expert on the “mythology of black criminality.”
A historian, Cobb is the former director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. Cobb received his BA degree from Howard University, and his MA and PhD from Rutgers University.
This engagement is sponsored by the CIC Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, the University Center for Civil Rights History and Research, and the USC Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. For information about the Media & Civil Rights History Symposium, visit the symposium website at https://bit.ly/sjmc-mcrhs or contact Kenneth Campbell at KCampbell@sc.edu. For information about the Keynote Speaker address and other DEI symposium events, contact Shirley Carter at sscarter@mailbox.sc.edu and DEI website https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/cic/about/diversity_and_inclusion/index.php.
Kenneth Campbell, Ph.D.
Shirley Carter, Ph.D.