The AUM Civil Rights & Civic Virtue Society will host our second Summer Seminar, a special week-long seminar for selected students, faculty, and staff. This workshop is connected to the themes of a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation titled “From Civil Rights to Civic Virtue: Forming Character through Community.” Student participants in this event receive $500 for their participation, which will be paid as a scholarship on their student account. Faculty and staff participants will receive a stipend for their participation.
The Summer Seminar will include visits to important historic sites and museums associated with the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery and Birmingham, structured reflection about these visits, and facilitated conversations on readings about the Civil Rights movement and the civic virtues of Civil Rights participants.
Our seminar speakers will be experts on civil rights, civic virtues, and character education. Our keynote speakers include Dr. Julie Armstrong, known for her work on civil rights literature; Dr. Meena Krishnamurthy, known for her work on civil rights activists; and Dr. Michael Lamb, known for his character education and the role of virtues in public life.
We will select up to 30 student participants for this exciting opportunity. We will fund up to 7 faculty participants and up to 3 staff participants. We hope that faculty and staff will consider applying for this opportunity themselves and in sharing this information with students who might be interested, particularly students who have been at AUM for at least one semester and who have at least two more semesters before graduation.
Apply by March 1, 2024
About the Keynote Speakers
Julie Buckner Armstrong is Professor of English at the University of South Florida.She has authored and edited multiple publications on the literature of civil rights and racial justice, including the Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature (Cambridge UP, 2015);Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (U of Georgia P, 2011);The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation (U of Georgia P, 2009); and, with Susan Hult Edwards, Houston Roberson, and Rhonda Williams,Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song (Routledge, 2002).
Her latest book, Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2023.
Dr. Armstrong’s presentation will focus on Birmingham, the civil rights struggles in the early 1960s, and the impact of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Dr. Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University in Canada. She is a political philosopher who works on race, democracy, social movements, and political psychology. Her work is largely about the role of political emotions in self and structural transformation. Her work explores how civil rights activists – especially Martin Luther King, Jr. – used protest, images, letters, and oratory to engage these emotions and to motivate transformative political action.
Her book, The Emotions of Nonviolence: Revisiting Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her scholarly work has appeared in Political Theory, the Monist, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice. She has also published pieces of public philosophy in the Boston Review and Jacobin.
Dr. Krishnamurthy’s presentation will focus on Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Michael Lamb is the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Character Project.
His research focuses on character education and the role of virtues in public life. A recipient of teaching awards from Oxford, Princeton, and Wake Forest, he is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought and co-editor of Cultivating Virtue in the University and Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life. He is currently the principal investigator of a $30 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to educate leaders of character at Wake Forest and support the Educating Character Initiative, which provides grants and resources to U.S. colleges and universities to develop character.
Dr. Lamb’s presentation will focus on evidence-based strategies for character development.
