Spring 2024 University Forum Schedule Set for Hattiesburg Campus
Mon, 01/29/2024 - 09:38am | By: David Tisdale
A lineup of intriguing speakers and equally compelling topics will again be on the menu when The University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) University Forum hosts three presentations throughout the spring 2024 semester at historic Bennett Auditorium on the Hattiesburg campus.
Now in its 49th year, University Forum is the premier speaker series at Southern Miss, bringing some of the most iconic and innovative cultural, scientific, and artistic voices in the world to the University examining contemporary ideas and concerns of our time.
Presenters for the spring schedule include the following:
*Feb. 6, 6:30 p.m. “True Tea with Kat Blaque” - Kat Blaque, a transgender rights activist who speaks out on issues of social justice concerning race, gender, and the LGBTQ+ community. She is known for fostering conversations where survivors and victims alike feel as though they have a voice, discussing white supremacy and how it’s impacted her own life, and advocating for self-acceptance in a world where trans people aren’t seen as valid.
Blaque playfully refers to herself as “intersectionality salad”, embodying various identities and experiences. She is a contributor to Everyday Feminism, Pride.com and the Huffington Post. She hosts a weekly show on her YouTube channel “True Tea” where she answers questions from her followers.
*March 19, 6:30 p.m. “Alone with Kristen Radtke” - Kristen Radtke is a writer and illustrator whose 2021 nonfiction comic, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, was named a best book of the year by NPR, TIME Magazine, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, and The Los Angeles Times. Publishers Weekly described Radtke’s work as “innovative in form and painfully relevant in content. . .For a treatise about the perils of being alone, it creates a wonderful sense of being drawn into conversation.” Seek You was awarded a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Radtke is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine, and her comics have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and the Oxford American.
*April 9, 6:30 p.m. “In Conversation with John Green” - John Green is a renowned author of works of fiction that include Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down, as well as a collection of essays, The Anthropocene Reviewed, which features detailed reviews to include the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. His books have been translated into more than 55 languages, and several have been adapted for film.
Along with his brother, Green is also a prolific co-creator of many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, is a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His charity, Project for Awesome, supports maternal health in Sierra Leone.
Dr. Andrew Haley, director of University Forum and associate professor of history, said this spring’s University Forum features storytellers “who use new media and old to explore our inner lives and civic virtues.”
“Kat Blaque offers a space online for transgender and Black concerns, Kristin Ratdke has transformed the graphic novel into a memoir, and John Green, who started his career finding new ways to teach history online, uses fiction and non-fiction to voice the concerns of young people and look more closely at the everyday materials that constitute our lives,” Dr. Haley noted. “Together, they ask us to look more closely at how our personal experiences are shaped by the complex and beautiful diversity of those experiences.”
University Forum is presented by the USM Honors College and Office of the President. Learn more at University Forum.