Freedom Dreaming in Dark Times

The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) Annual Public Lecture features distinguished public intellectuals whose work promotes engaged thought, scholarship, and praxis around the topics of race and ethnicity within the public sphere.  This year's Annual Public Lecture is co-sponsored by the International House and Lead support for the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series comes from the Zell Family Foundation.

Co-sponsors: The University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, AAUP, The Pozen Center for Human Rights, The Office of the Provost, The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

EVENT DETAILS:

Freedom Dreaming in Dark Times

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Tabling & Pre-Reception: 5:00 – 6:00 PM CST

Main Program: 6:00 – 7:30 PM CST

1414 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 

About Robin D.G. Kelley: 

Robin D. G. Kelley is a leading historian of social movements, cultural politics, and the Black radical imagination, for our annual public lecture. Kelley’s work explores how communities have struggled for freedom, how protest movements take shape, and how imagining new futures is itself a powerful form of resistance. His scholarship connects history to the present moment, offering tools to better understand protest, democracy, and the possibilities of social change—making his work especially relevant today.

About Adom Getachew:

Adom Getachew is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). As part of a four-member curatorial team, she curated the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism. Her public writing has appeared in Boston Review, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.