Kimberly M. Welch, assistant professor of history and of law, will deliver the next lecture in Vanderbilt Law School’s Dean’s Lecture Series on Race and Discrimination. The online event will be Thursday, March 4, beginning at noon CT. All are invited to attend.
The Dean’s Lecture Series on Race and Discrimination annually convenes scholars and thought leaders to provide the Vanderbilt community with foundational knowledge on race, civil rights, discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, and critical historical milestones and their importance. The series’ aim is to ground our understanding of present-day discourse in a deeper, historically informed context to highlight social and political movements, impetus for legal changes, and ongoing areas of contention and struggle in race, civil rights and discrimination.
Welch is a historian of the United States with a focus on slavery, race and law in the American South. She is particularly interested in the world of free and enslaved African Americans, how they understood their place in Southern society and how they advanced it. Her first book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), is a historical and socio-legal study of free and enslaved African Americans’ use of the local courts in the South.