State of Play in U.S. Politics Leading Up to the 2024 Presidential Election

 

The stakes in the upcoming US elections are high, not just for the two established political parties, but for all who value democracy and the rule of law. As we approach this pivotal moment, we are thrilled to announce a series of three compelling public lectures scheduled for this Fall. On September 12th, Jamelle Bouie from The New York Times will kick off our series with insights into the upcoming US general election. Following on September 26th, D.D. Guttenplan of The Nation will delve into broader political and cultural shifts reshaping America. Our final lecture on October 24th will feature Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Princeton Professor and renowned commentator on race and politics. These speakers promise to enrich our understanding of critical election issues, offering invaluable perspectives for our academic community and beyond. We invite your participation in these events, which are sure to produce vibrant discourse on the future of American democracy.

 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, a semi-finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.

 

Taylor is a scholar of racial inequality in public policy making and the various ways that Black communities have challenged or resisted these constraints. She writes extensively on race and politics, Black social movements and organizing, and radical activism and politics. Taylor is currently working on a project examining the retreat in the 1980s from the promise of civil rights, alongside the emergence of widening chasms in Black America along social, economic and political fault lines.

 

Taylor is among the inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars funded by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. Taylor has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. She is a 2021 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Taylor is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker.

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. This Series is supported by The School of Cities, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, Centre for European and Eurasian Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Department of History, Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.