EP #227 - 02. 24.2021 - Bearing Witness: COVID-19 Oral History & the Public Good

Today is a discussion in partnership w/the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest of Villanova University, with William Horne, KEERA Céire Kealty, and Fen Kennedy of the Bearing Witness: COVID-19 Oral History and the Public Good project.

William Horne, Co-Founder and Editor of The Activist History Review, is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University who writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, disability, and capitalism in post-Civil War Louisiana. He holds a PhD in History from The George Washington University and can be followed on Twitter at @wihorne.

Céire Kealty is a doctoral student in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Villanova University. Her work employs fashion theory and theological ethics to interrogate the fashion industry and its contribution to labor exploitation, racism, and environmental degradation. She is also interested in garments as loci of power, mystery, and presence, in both religious and “secular” settings. Before coming to Villanova, she studied at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, and received a BA in Religious Studies and BBA in Accounting. Her Twitter handle is @C31R3.

Dr. Fen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Alabama. Their research - theoretical and physical - focusses on how dance can articulate the norms and values of a society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Their work has been featured in Dance Chronicle, the Journal of Dance Education, the Activist History Review and is forthcoming in several anthologies. Their latest dance work Pressure, commissioned in collaboration with Melissa Yes for the Alabama Repertory Dace Theatre, explored stressors on the lives of young women during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In their spare time Fen teaches and organizes gender-friendly social partner dancing around the US.