Sunday, February 23, 2020, 2pm
Culture and Race in the Public Sphere
Presenters: Anthony Poore, Nathaniel Sheidley, Dennis Britton, J. Dennis Robinson
Location: Portsmouth Public Library, Levenson Room
Many of our beliefs are passed along to us from our families and communities, who transmit the foundational ideas that shape how we see the world. How the arts and humanities shape their contents also have a powerful influence on how we form particular beliefs.
This panel will discuss the historical role the arts, literature and interpretive spaces such as museums have played in shaping our beliefs and discuss the value of presenting more inclusive stories and diverse representations into the public sphere.
Biographies
Anthony Poore joined NH Humanities as Executive Director in 2018. Previously he worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in regional and community outreach and was Assistant Dean of Southern New Hampshire University’s School of Community Economic Development. In Anthony’s 25 years of experience in the community economic development sector, he has worked as a practitioner, policy analyst, researcher and executive addressing the needs of urban and rural communities through participatory cross-sector collaborative processes. Currently, Anthony serves on the Board of Directors of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, Endowment for Health, Manchester Community College and NH Listens Advisory Boards.
Nathaniel Sheidley is former Executive Director of the Bostonian Society and now serves as the 1st President and CEO of Revolutionary Spaces. This new organization completes the merger of the Bostonian Society with the Old South Association of Boston, creating a dynamic new historical resource. He works to connect people to the history and personal practice of democracy through encounters with two of the nation’s most important Revolutionary sites – Boston’s Old South Meeting House and Old State House. Nathaniel Sheidley earned his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University.
Dennis Britton is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and co-editor with Melissa Walter of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018). He is also the coeditor with Kimberly Coles of a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” He is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Human Difference on the Early Modern Stage, and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England. Dennis Britton earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin.
J. Dennis Robinson is a popular newspaper columnist, lecturer, and public historian. He is the author of a dozen narrative history books on topics ranging from Jesse James, Lord Baltimore, and child labor exploitation to the historic Music Hall theater, Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, Strawbery Banke Museum, Privateer Lynx, archaeology at the Isles of Shoals, and the infamous 1873 Smuttynose Island ax murders. Dennis lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just across the swirling Piscataqua River from Maine.
