Professor Dierdre Cooper Owens. Photo by Craig Chandler / University of Nebraska-Lincoln CommunicationClaremont, Calif. (April 8, 2022)—Award-winning historian Deirdre Cooper Owens will give the spring Racial Justice Initiative Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, April 13, at 4:15 p.m. PT. Cooper Owens’ talk will be virtual, and community members can tune in on Zoom. Visit the College’s Event Calendar for more information.
Cooper Owens is the Charles and Linda Wilson professor in the history of medicine and director of the humanities in medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In this position, she is one of two Black women in the US running a medical humanities program. Cooper Owens is also the director of the program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, which was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731 and is the country’s oldest cultural institution.
Cooper Owens is a graduate of two historically Black colleges and universities, the all-women’s Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her PhD in history at UCLA and has had a number of prestigious fellowships at the University of Virginia, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and as a Big Ten Academic Leadership Fellow. As one of the country’s most “acclaimed experts in US history,” according to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all.
The lecture is sponsored by the Racial Justice Initiative. In an effort to support productive discussion, analysis, and activism, President Melvin L. Oliver’s Racial Justice Initiative provides funds for three primary prongs: curricular transformation, co-curricular transformation, and structural transformation. Together, these are designed to deepen student, staff, and faculty knowledge and action around racialized violence.
