This May marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Martin Delany, an African American abolitionist, Harvard-educated physician, and Civil War officer. Join us for a panel discussion about the history, science, and social ideologies surrounding Delany’s fascinating and powerful life story.

Speakers' Bio:  Dr. Molefi Kete Asante is Professor, Department of African American Studies at Temple University. Asante has published 70 books, among the most recent are Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait, An Afrocentric Manifesto, and Encyclopedia of African Religion, co-edited with Ama Mazama.  In l984 Dr. Asante became chair of the African American Studies Program at Temple University where he created the first Ph.D. Program in African American Studies in 1987. He has directed more than 140 Ph.D. dissertations. He has written more than 400 articles and essays for journals, books and magazines and is the founder of the theory of Afrocentricity.

William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, taught courses in interpretive and qualitative research, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament.  Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. Ayers’ articles have appeared in many journals including the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, and Teachers College Record.

Alondra Nelson teaches sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary social scientist, Alondra writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. Her books include Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination and she is editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. An internationally recognized scholar, Nelson has been a visiting fellow at BIOS: Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and at the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie in Munich. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.