Davis

Scholar, author and political activist Angela Davis will speak Friday, April 25, at 7:30 p.m. in the Alice Statler Auditorium as part of the 2014 Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin lecture series. Free tickets are available at the Graduate School Deans’ Office, 350 Caldwell Hall.

Davis, professor emerita of history of consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, and of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will attend classes and have lunch with students. Her work as an educator at the university level and in the larger public sphere has emphasized building communities for economic, racial and gender equality. Davis is the author of eight books and has lectured worldwide.

A persistent theme of her recent work has been the social problems associated with incarceration and the criminalization of communities most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws on her own experiences in the early 1970s when she spent 18 months in jail and on trial and was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List for a crime she did not commit. She has also conducted extensive research on issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.

Davis’ most recent books are “Abolition Democracy” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?” She is completing a book titled “Prisons and American History.”

Davis works with Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the prison-industrial complex, and Sisters Inside, an organization in Queensland, Australia, that works with women in prison.



Davis has taught at San Francisco State University; Mills College; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; Vassar College; the Claremont Colleges; and Stanford University.

Davis will sign copies of her books following the lecture. The 2014 Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation was created at Cornell in 1987 to foster the intellectual exchange of ideas and help drive discussion of critical issues in the sciences and the humanities.