Opening the first of a three-part series of talks is Dr. Tennille Nicole Allen. who  is the Director of African American and Ethnic and Cultural Studies as well as Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Lewis University. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Tennille is also merging the scholarly and teaching aspects of her professorial life with experiential learning courses in community-based participatory research in communities in Joliet and Chicago.

In Barracoon (the featured book for the series of talks), Zora Neale Hurston, a founding member of the Harlem Renaissance who was also a groundbreaking novelist, playwright, and anthropologist, uses her social science training to unpack linkages between Africa, enslavement, and the Jim Crow era in a series of interviews in 1927 with Kossula (Cudjo) Lewis, then the last living survivor of the African Slave Trade. In this talk, Dr. Tennille Nicole Allen of Lewis University discusses this reclaimed story while also sharing insight into Zora Neale Hurston's own reclaimed story.