Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Virtual Keynote Talk by Dr. Brittney Cooper – “Reimagining Black Liberation”

Dr, Brittney Cooper, associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers, will deliver the keynote talk – online only this year – for UNC Asheville’s annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. The talk, titled Reimagining Black Liberation, will be free and open to everyone, will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 26. Click here to pre-register. Cooper also will teach an online master class for UNC Asheville students at noon the same day.

Cooper is the author of the memoir Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, and Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, winner of the 2018 Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians.

A cultural commentator, Cooper has written for media outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Ebony, and The Root. She is active on Twitter @ProfessorCrunk and is co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective where she blogs as “crunktastic”; she is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection – Essays on hip-hop feminism.

Cooper earned her Ph.D. in American studies from Emory University, where she had also earned her master’s degree. She did her undergraduate work at Howard University where she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and political science.

Please note: UNC Asheville’s MLK Commemoration includes events just for our students and university community. You can find those events here.