Watch a recording of the event on our YouTube channel.

Join the MIT Libraries for an evening with cultural critic, celebrated sociologist, and award-winning writer Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Introduction by Kelcey Gibbons, PhD student, Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS)

Q&A moderated by Sandy Alexandre, Associate Professor of Literature

This is a hybrid event:

• In-person attendance at Hayden Library (14S-100): MIT Covid Pass required
• The event will also be live streamed at http://web.mit.edu/webcast/lib/s22/1/

Tressie McMillan Cottom explores the everyday culture of big ideas like racism, sexism, inequality, and oppression by giving us the language to live better lives. Her far-ranging intellectual interests include books, articles, magazine profiles, and opinion-editorials, but it is her essays that routinely shape the discourse – part revolutionary pamphlet, part poetic chapbook, part sociological analysis, and part call-to-arms. Her 2019 collection of essays, Thick, was a National Book Award finalist. Her first book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy questioned the fundamental narrative of American education policy.

Cottom is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and New York Times contributing opinion writer. She is a member of the inaugural external advisory committee for the MIT Libraries’ Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).

This event is free but registration is required. 

MIT Libraries is committed to making our events accessible; email ce-lib@mit.edu to request accommodations.