Today’s “Faculty Feats” features Communication Studies Professor Marilyn DeLaure, who recently gave a featured talk about her research at her undergraduate alma mater, Drake University in Iowa.
Poster for Professor DeLaure's Talk
Remembering the Sit-Ins: Performing Public Memory at Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Center and Museum
Commemoration is a complex rhetorical endeavor: how we remember significant historical events shapes our relationships to the past, present, and future. This project explores how a recently opened commemorative site, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM) in Greensboro, North Carolina, constructs public memory. Housed in the original F.W. Woolworth’s dime store where four college freshmen sat down at a whites-only lunch counter on February 1, 1960, the ICRCM commemorates a key rhetorical performance of the civil rights movement by preserving its very stage as hallowed public space. While the ICRCM contains the trauma of segregation and racism too neatly in the past, the museum also invites visitors to identify with the student protestors and reenact their journey, thus celebrating grassroots organizing and the activist potential of the ordinary citizen.
Congratulations to Professor DeLaure on her talk! How fun to go back to your alma mater and address the current students! Maybe some of our current students will one day return to USF to give a featured presentation!
