Spring 2025 Event Series
Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always,
are free and open to the public.
- Wednesday, February 5, 2025
- Michael Rose Theatre
- Reception: 5:30pm // Program: 6:00pm
- Convenient parking in the Zach Curlin Lot
This event is free and open to all, but registration is required. Register at this link.
The Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities is a proud co-sponsor of the Hooks Institute
Book Award Presentation. This year,, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change
at the University of Memphis has selected Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money and Power Behind the Civil
Rights Movement by Dr. Tanisha C. Ford (Amistad) as the 2023 Hooks National Book Award winner.
An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of
the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the
glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for
fifty years—a glamorous soiree rivaling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy
and cultured, both Black and white.
Historian and cultural critic Tanisha C. Ford brings Mollie into focus as never before,
charting her rise from Jim Crow Mississippi to doyenne of Manhattan and Harlem, where
she became one of the most influential philanthropists of her time—a woman feared,
resented, yet widely respected. She chronicles Mollie’s larger-than-life antics through
exhaustive research, never-before-revealed letters, and dozens of interviews.
Join MOCH for a screening of Shadow People (2024, 8min) followed by a roundtable discussion focused on how the arts intersect
with policy, advocacy, and university research in helping us better understand the
human impact of migration.
Shadow People, directed by Memphian Aaron Baggett, is an intimate dialogue between a mother and
son. Dorian, who lives in Memphis, longs to visit his ailing grandmother in Honduras.
But his mother, Onyeda, fears his legal status will prevent his return to the U.S.,
risking their relationship and sacrifices made to reach this country.
After the screening, we'll have a discussion with the film's producer and subject,
Dorian Canales, along with an interdisciplinary group of experts on the legal and
cultural issues around migration in Memphis.
Dorian Canales is a commercial banker at JP Morgan Chase and co-founder of Dacacademy, producer
of Shadow People. Bryce Ashby, a labor and employment attorney at Donati Law, has co-written dozens of op-eds for
Memphis Flyer and Daily Memphian about immigration policy and is co-author of Immigration, Policy, and the People of Latin America: Stories from Seven Sending Nations
(Routledge, 2024). Dr. Elizabeth Iams Wellman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis whose
research focuses on how international migration is reshaping electoral politics and
national citizenship. She is also an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and serves
on the Board of Directors of Kartemquin Films.
Emily Greble // Vanderbilt University
This event is part of the Memphis Sesquicentennial Lecture Series
- Thursday, April 3, 2025
- 5:30pm Reception // 6:00pm Lecture
- Maxine Smith University Center Shelby Room (UC 342)
- This event is jointly sponsored by the Department of History and the Marcus W. Orr
Center for the Humanities.
Dr Greble will explore the entangled narratives of racial politics and understandings
of rescue in multiconfessional, post-Ottoman spaces in the Balkans. Drawing especially
upon lived experiences and engagements of Bosnian Jews and Muslims during the 1930s
and 1940s, the talk raises questions about how it was possible to have mass condemnations
of the Holocaust and many private efforts to save Jews and Jewish culture in the same
place, and sometimes by some of the same people, who sought alliances with Nazi Germany
and supported the creation of the Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS unit. In suggesting some
answers, Greble explores how local communities operated beyond the ideological frameworks
and historical mythologies that are often used to describe their lives.
Emily Greble is Nelson O. Tyrone Chair in History at Vanderbilt University, where
she is also Professor of East European Studies and Chair of the History Department.
She is the author of Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Cornell, 2021) and Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford, 2021), which won numerous book prizes and was named one of the Financial
Times best history books of 2022. Greble has also won many prestigious grants and
fellowships, including a Guggenheim, an National Endowment of the Humanities award,
Fulbright, and a fellowship at the US. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
