KINGSTON, R.I. – Jan. 21, 2020 – Respected historian and researcher Françoise Hamlin will be the keynote speaker for the University of Rhode Island’s Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Luncheon Wednesday, Feb. 5.

The luncheon will start at noon at the Multicultural Student Services Center, Hardge Forum, 74 Lower College Road, on the Kingston Campus.

Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press), for which she won the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. Her co-edited anthology, These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War, published in 2015 by the University of Florida Press, was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction. It was republished in paperback in 2018.

Her current research includes work on children and the complexities of activism during the civil rights movement. An associate professor of History and Africana Studies at Brown University, Hamlin earned her doctorate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University, her master’s from the University of London, and her bachelor of arts from the University of Essex (both in United States Studies).

She is a winner of the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, and a recipient of the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship at the University of Michigan; the Charles Warren Center Fellowship at Harvard University; a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship; and the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition, she has won major mentoring and teaching awards at Brown University.

The Unity Luncheon is a sharing of food, song, and reflection in celebration of the legacy of ideas espoused by King, and the application of his legacy at the University of Rhode Island. It is presented by the Multicultural Student Services Center, the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the University of Rhode Island Chaplains Association.

Due to space limitations, the luncheon is open to URI students, faculty and staff only. For more information, please contact George Gallien, director of the Multicultural Student Services Center at URI, at 401-874-5829 or george_gallien@uri.edu.