Contact:
Jonathan Potts
412-268-6094

For immediate release:
September 19, 2006

Carnegie Mellon's CAUSE Speaker Series Kicks Off Oct. 6

PITTSBURGH—The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University will launch its 2006-07 Speaker Series at 5 p.m., Oct. 6 with a talk by Matthew C. Whitaker, associate professor of history at Arizona State University. His talk is titled "Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West" and will take place in the H&SS Auditorium, Baker Hall A53. All events in the CAUSE Speaker Series are free and open to the public.

Established in 1995, CAUSE aims to link the historian's interest in race, work and economic change over time with contemporary analyses of politics, the urban labor force and employment policies. It develops programs of graduate and postdoctoral training, scholarly research, data collection, publications, and education.

Each talk begins at 5 p.m., and refreshments are served at 4:30 p.m. Unless specified, the locations for the talks are yet to be determined. For more information, call 412-268-8928.

The other speakers are:

• Nov. 10: Cheryl D. Hicks, "'She Would Be Better Off in the South:' Working-Class Black Women and Their Families Response to New York State's Use of Southern Parole." Hicks is an assistant professor of history at Williams College. Her talk will take place in the H&SS Auditorium.

• Feb. 16: Wallace D. Best, "The South and the City: Migration and Sacred Space in an Urban Black Metropolis." Best is an assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School.

• March 2: Matthew Countryman, "Up South: A Social Movement Perspective on the Rise of Black Power in the Urban North." Countryman is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

• March 23: Dianne Glave, "Fields, Gardens and Woods: An Environmental History of Rural African Americans in the Progressive Era South." Glave is the Aron Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Environmental Research at Tulane University.

• April 13: Luther Adams, "Upon This Rock: African American Migration, Urban Renewal and the Struggle for Equality in Louisville, Kentucky." Adams is the 2006-07 CAUSE postdoctoral fellow. He is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma.