"New Orleans: Historical Memory and Urban Design"
Anna Livia Brand, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor of English
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
12-1:30pm
170 Wurster
Part of the Global Urban Humanities Colloquium The City and Its People, Rhetoric 198-3 / ARCH 198-2, Rhetoric 244A / ARCH 298-2
Dr. Anna Livia Brand joins the College of Environmental Design this fall as an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning. Her research focuses on the intersection of race and space, specifically looking at historic black mecca neighborhoods and how they change through processes of gentrification and resistance. Her comparative research focuses on cities in the American North and South, including New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and New York. This work highlights the ongoing spatial impacts of racial processes and resistance to these processes over time and evaluates the role that urban planning and design plays. Within her work, Dr. Brand focuses on interpretations of everyday landscapes and the built environment and she is interested in the ways that people shape and create a place for themselves in urban environments and the ways that they imagine more just places and communities. Dr. Brand’s background is in urban planning and design. She has worked professionally as both a planner and designer. She received her Bachelor and Master of Architecture from Tulane University, her master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of New Orleans, and her Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia before coming to Berkeley in 2002. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has secondary interests in legal history and popular music. He has published Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017). A book on The Wild Tchoupitoulas—a landmark album of processional call-and-response music arranged as electric funk—is forthcoming in the 33 1/3 Series from Bloomsbury. A critical edition, The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love, is forthcoming from LSU Press. Current research includes a collaborative cartographic digital archive, Louisiana Slave Conspiracies, and a multimedia project on the political culture of Reconstruction.
This talk is also the topic of the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Studio for Spring 2019. Undergraduate students interested in this studio should attend this talk or to the info sessions listed on the Events + Deadline Calendar.
See the full Fall 2018 Global Urban Humanities Colloquium Schedule