Days of Our Beginnings
The theme for the 2025-26 Creative Intelligence Series picks up on lines of poetry from Crystal Wilkinson’s poem “The Visit.” Like the speaker in the poem, who imaginatively revisits a childhood moment of intimacy, the series revisits histories – personal, regional, national and global – in order to consider what we may have overlooked or learned incompletely. It offers deeper knowledge of the past as we navigate our present moment and as we look towards what lies ahead.
Kremena Todorova, Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Intelligence Series
Creative Intelligence Events
Additional speakers will be added as they are confirmed. Specific details and ticketing information for the events will be included as they become available.
Sept. 16, 2025: Akilah Hughes
Academic Convocation
Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence
Akilah Hughes is an award-winning podcast host of Crooked Media’s What a Day daily news podcast, a USC MacArthur Foundation Civic Media Fellow and the author of Obviously: Stories from My Timeline for Penguin Random House. Hughes has created hundreds of videos, garnering more than 100 million views across the internet for companies such as HBO, Comedy Central, ABC and her own YouTube channel since 2013. Her latest project is Rebel Spirit, a podcast in which she returns to her hometown of Florence, Kentucky, to try to convince her high school to change its dated, racist mascot, the “Rebels,” to something “everyone in the South loves.”
- Convocation talk — Tuesday, Sept. 16, 4:30 p.m., Haggin Auditorium
“Building A Better South”
Oct. 28, 2025: Amrita Chakrabarti Myers
Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence and the Hazelrig Lecture Series for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is a historian of Black women whose research focuses on race, gender, power and freedom in the Old South. Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2011. Her second monograph, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, was released by UNC/Ferris & Ferris Books in late 2023 and has already garnered numerous honors. (The “vice president” in the title refers to Richard Mentor Johnson, a Transylvania University graduate.)
Myers has received several awards for her scholarship, including the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the 2011 Anna Julia Cooper–C.L.R. James Book Prize from the National Council for Black Studies. She currently serves as director of graduate studies and the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington.
- Public talk — Tuesday, Oct. 28, 6 p.m., Carrick Theater
“Invisibility and Erasure: The Vice President’s Black Wife”
