Images from the Night and Day

See Carl Smith of NU this Tuesday Evening

We are pleased to invite the entire area community to attend a presentation Tuesday evening by Northwestern University scholar Carl Smith. At 7:00 pm in the Cornog Auditorium, Professor Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, will inaugurate the American Studies Day "PLACE" theme in front of an audience consisting of current students and their parents, as well as former students and the wider community.

Schedule for May 11th

Use the scroll bars to see the entire schedule. NOTE: this schedule will update automatically as changes are made:

Our Guest Performer: Roger Bonair-Agard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Roger Bonair-Agard is a poet who lives in Chicago. Bonair-Agard was a member of the 1997 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Poetry Slam team and later coached the 1998 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Poetry Slam team, which went on to win the National Poetry Slam Championship that year in Austin, TX.

He then co-founded the louderARTS Project and has been on the 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 louderARTS Poetry Slam teams. In 1999, he won the individual competition at the National Poetry Slam. He is currently the Artistic Director for louderARTS.

Bonair-Agard studied Political Science at Hunter College, and was about to take the Law School Admission Test when he decided to concentrate on poetry rather than a law career.

Our Keynote Speakers

The third annual American Studies Day has now been given a theme ("PLACE") and is anchored by two keynote speakers, both prestigious scholars from Northwestern University.

Carl Smith, professor of English, History, and American Studies has written numerous books related to our theme including The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman as well as The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. The latter was chosen by the Chicago Public Library as the Fall 2009 selection in its "One Book, One Chicago" program.

He is also the creator of two major online exhibitions, The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory and The Dramas of Haymarket. He helped found the Northwestern Program in American Studies and has served multiple times as director or associate director. In 1994 he was named Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern.

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Henry Binford, an urban historian who specializes in 19th century sub-communities such as suburbs and slums has a special interest in the efforts to redevelop cities in the 20th century. His most recent book is The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860. He was the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence for three years.

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Graciously reprising and expanding upon her original appearance during last year's American Studies Day, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Maria Finitzo will be speaking with our students once again. Her filmography can be viewed here.

From Kartemquin Films:

For more than 25 years, Maria Finitzo has been an award-winning filmmaker producing and directing documentary films for network television, public broadcasting, cable TV and the Internet. Her films have tackled a variety of subjects from the controversial science of stem cell research and the hard questions surrounding the command and control of nuclear weapons to the psychology of adolescent girls.

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Finally, and very fortunately, we have been able to draw Molly Metzger, a Graduate Research Fellow at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research (and a New Trier alum). Her current research focuses on affordable housing, demonstrating the ways in which recent policies have destabilized urban communities and reinforced geographic patterns of inequality.

She is also a member of the Lathrop Leadership Team, a group of public housing residents and allies who are fighting to preserve the last large-scale public housing development on Chicago's north side.