Loyola’s 2018 Humanities Symposium to reflect on the life of Frederick Douglass

Loyola University Maryland’s Center for the Humanities will host its annual Humanities Symposium with various events celebrating the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass, an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, and writer, on March 14-15, 2018.

This year’s text is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave. Douglass wrote a searing description of his life as a slave in Maryland and used his fame to influence the abolitionist movement in the United States. He pushed for full social and economic equality for African Americans. The year 2018 marks the bicentennial of Douglass's birth, which Maryland is celebrating through exhibits, lectures, theater productions and more.

Loyola faculty are encouraged to bring their classes to McManus Theatre during the symposium for discussions on this work. Faculty workshops will also be held. 

The symposium will feature a keynote address, “Good Religion and Bad Faith in the Age of Abolition: Frederick Douglass’ Afro-Evangelicalism,” by Maurice Wallace, Ph.D., associate professor and associate director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, on Thursday, March 15, at 6 p.m. in McGuire Hall.

Wallace earned his Ph.D. at Duke University and his bachelor degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African-American Men’s Literature and Culture, and Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance. 

The keynote address is free and open to the public. For more information, go to loyola.edu/symposium.