Radical Roots of Harlem Renaissance is Subject of Talk
At Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus on April 8

Brooklyn, N.Y. — The origins of the Harlem Renaissance in the radical ferment of the "new Negro" movement of World War I and the immediate postwar period is the focus of a lecture at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus.

The "Starting from Paumonok" lecture, sponsored by the Campus’s English Department, will take place on Tuesday, April 8 at 6 p.m. in the Health Sciences Building, Room 107. Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, will discuss "The Radical Origins of the Harlem Renaissance" in her Brooklyn Campus talk.

Foley has taught and lectured widely on American literature and has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is the author of "Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941," and the forthcoming "Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro." She is currently working on two volumes about Jean Toomer and the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a book about Ralph Ellison and the Cold War.

Long Island University’s lecture series on American culture and literature, "Starting from Paumanok," carries the title of one of Walt Whitman’s most celebrated poems, and honors the University’s connection with Long Island’s poet laureate. "Paumanok" is a Native American word for Long Island.

The series is supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the John P. McGrath Fund. For more information, call (718) 488-1050.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 30,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including nearly 11,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.