In cooperation with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies of the University of Bonn,the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Research Unit Voluntariness Erfurt|Jena|Oldenburg, we cordially invite you to our hybrid

2022 Juneteenth Lecture
“Reshaping Freedom: Harriet Tubman's Abolitionism and the Path to Citizenship”

with
Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens
Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine
and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Wednesday, June 22nd
6 p.m.
Niebuhrstraße 5
53113 Bonn
and via Zoom

Seating is limited! Please register via e-mail to: info@amerikahaus-nrw.de
and specify whether you want to participate in person or via Zoom.

In this talk, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian of slavery and medicine, explores how both freedom and citizenship functioned in the lives of antebellum-era African Americans when most were considered chattel and ineligible for the rights of citizenship. Harriet Tubman, an enslaved woman who lived in a patriarchal and anti-Black America, led over 70 enslaved people to freedom from Eastern Shore Maryland to free states and to Canada. She became a savior of weary laborers as well as a symbol of communal democracy. Harriet Tubman’s freedom dream and fugitive activism demonstrated a version of freedom where Black women were liberators and had a disabled Black woman at its center. Thus, freedom-fighting abolitionist Harriet Tubman complicated and expanded democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship rights for all of the groups to whom she belonged: the disabled, women, enslaved, and African Americans.

Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Research Fellow and has won a number of prestigious honors and awards for her scholarly and advocacy work in history and reproductive and birthing justice. A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken domestically and internationally. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on several issues that concern. African American historical experiences and reproductive justice. Personally, she is a native South Carolinian from the Low Country with family ties to the state’s colonial past.