Join the UIowa Office of the Vice President for Research for a special reading and reception as part of the Book Matters Series, celebrating assistant professor Tara Bynum, who will read from and talk about her new book, Reading Pleasures : Everyday Black Living in Early America .  She will be joined by Ashley Howard, assistant professor in the UI Department of History, for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Reception in the café following the event.

“Sit down, read this book, and become a changed reader, scholar, and human. Sit down, and learn from Tara Bynum about worlds of Black experience—joy, longing, pleasure—beyond the white gaze. Through her brilliant literary research and reading of early African American literature, Bynum achieves the full humanity that a viciously segregated, racialized world denies all of us: some in body, some in understanding and spirit. In so doing, this book exemplifies what the humanities should be all about.”—Joanna Brooks

 Bynum is assistant professor in the UI Departments of English and African American Studies and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800.