News & Events Professor and Author Heather Williams to Speak at Amherst College Nov. 30

November 2, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Heather Williams will speak on “Teaching as a Political Act: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom” at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 30, in the Cole Assembly Room (Red Room) in Converse Hall at Amherst College. Sponsored by the President's Initiative Fund on Education and Social Justice, this event is free and open to the public.

Williams, the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005), is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where she teaches and writes about African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the American South. Her current research centers on the separation of African American families during the antebellum period and subsequent attempts to reunify families following emancipation.

###