An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture

In this presentation, Bryan Wagner (UC Berkeley) will discuss the public humanities consortium, An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture, whose purpose is to create and share multimedia educational resources about art, music, dance, history, language, literature, folklore and religion. These resources are available to teachers and students at no cost under a creative commons license. They include original lecture, performance, and documentary videos as well as photos, artworks, manuscripts, historical maps, oral histories, listening guides, and sound recordings. This project is based in New Orleans, but it includes participants elsewhere who teach about the city's history and culture. We will be joining together in curriculum workshops and in classroom exchanges where students will share their ideas and collaborate on digital research projects.

Bryan Wagner is Director of the Folklore Program, Professor in the English Department, and Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard, 2009), The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton, 2017), The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Bloomsbury, 33 ⅓ Series, 2019), Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Fordham, 2019), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (LSU, 2019). He is Principal Investigator for two multidisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies (lsc.berkeley.edu), an interactive archive of trial manuscripts related to slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795, and Tremé 1908, which tells the story of one year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighborhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation. He is also the founding director of public humanities collaboration, An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture.

To help with our planning, please register with an email to Amy.Mohr@lmu.de.
Thank you!

Sponsored by the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) and the Alumni Association of the Amerika-Institut Munich