The Cornell University Nineteenth-Century Americanist Reading Group welcomes Britt Rusert, Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a 2023-24 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. Dr. Rusert will deliver a keynote address for the Collectivity Conference, titled "Mutual Aid and Community Defense: Blueprints and Lessons from the Long Nineteenth Century."

Dr. Rusert is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017) and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), a collection of the visual graphics Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University prepared for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book.

The Collectivity Conference is sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation and organized by the Nineteenth-Century Americanist Reading Group at Cornell University.

Graduate Panels will follow on Saturday, 9/30, from 9:30AM - 3PM.