Please join the Center for Theater and Performance Studies, The Scherer Center for American Culture and the English Department for a guest lecture entitled “Black Childhood on Trial: The Tragedy of William Freeman” given by Robin Bernstein (Harvard University, African and African American Studies, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality)

“Black Childhood on Trial: The Tragedy of William Freeman” tells the story of a young African American man who, in the mid-nineteenth century, was wrongfully imprisoned and then subsequently committed murder, endured a spectacular trial, and was ultimately forced to star in a theatrical spectacle.  The murder involved no black children, but the subsequent performances configured black children as threats and white children as victims.  These performances transformed the life and death of William Freeman into a referendum on the meaning of black childhood in the gradually emancipating North.

Robin Bernstein is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.  She is also a faculty member in Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies and undergraduate program in Theater, Dance, and Media.  Her most recent book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards, including the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and was runner-up for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association.  She has published essays on US cultural history, with an emphasis on performance, theatre, drama, and visual culture, in journals including PMLA, African American Review, Theatre Journal, Social Text, Modern Drama, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.  Her article on Nikki Giovanni and performance won the 2014 Darwin T. Turner Award for “the best essay representing any period in African American or pan-African literature and culture” published in African American Review.  Bernstein is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research and co-editor of the book series “Performance and American Cultures” for New York University Press.

Location: Rosenwald 405

A light reception will follow.

People with disabilities who believe they may require accommodations should contact Anne Rebull (anner@uchicago.edu) in advance.