The Arkansas Center for Research in Economics, the UCA Department of History, and the UCA Department of Economics, Finance and Insurance and Risk Management will recognize Black History and Women’s History with informational displays on the lawn of the College of Business and several prominent speakers visiting the campus. The following is a listing of the celebratory activities:
Monday, February 23 to Sunday, March 1
Fixed installation of 14 informational, 3’ by 5’ displays on the College of Business lawn
Tuesday, February 24
Nivea Earl, entrepreneur
An Entrepreneur’s Experience in Arkansas: Hair Braiding
2:30 – 3:30 p.m.
College of Business lobby
Light refreshments will be served
Wednesday, February 25
Angela Boswell, Henderson State University
Women and Property Laws in the Early Nineteenth-Century U.S. South
noon – 1:00 p.m.
Brewer Hegeman, Room 113
Sondra Gordy, University of Central Arkansas
“The Lost Year” film screening and discussion
5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
College of Business, 107
Light refreshments will be served in the lobby 15 minutes prior to the screening and discussion
Thursday, February 26
John Kirk and Jess Porter, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Neighborhood Urban Renewal in Little Rock
1:40 – 2:50 p.m.
College of Business 107
Fabio Rojas, Indiana University-Bloomington
“Modern Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement”
Paul Avelar, Institute for Justice
“The Unfulfilled Promise of the 14th Amendment: The Right to Earn a Living as a Constitutional Right”
5:00 pm to 7:30 pm
College of Business, 107
Light refreshments will be served in the lobby 15 minutes prior to the screening and discussion
– 30 –
Speaker biographies
Paul Avelar is an attorney in the Institute for Justice’s Arizona office. He joined the Institute in March 2010 and litigates free speech, school choice, property rights, economic liberty and other constitutional cases in both federal and state courts. Prior to joining the Institute for Justice, Avelar worked as an attorney in Philadelphia. He is a former law clerk to the Judge Roger Miner of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Andrew Hurwitz of the Arizona Supreme Court, and Judge Daniel Barker of the Arizona Court of Appeals. He received his law degree from the Arizona State University College of Law in 2004 and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2000. Paul also represents natural hair braiders across the country to protect their right to earn an honest living. He is currently leading Institute for Justice national Braiding Freedom Initiative, which is using lawsuits, activism, and research to get rid of laws that require hundreds of hours of training, at a cost of thousands of dollars, just to braid hair.
Angela Boswell is a professor of history at Henderson State University, where she has been a faculty member since 1997. She earned a B.A. in history from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a widely published author. Her book, Her Act and Deed: Women’s Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837-73 (Texas A&M University Press, October 2001) won the Texas State Historical Association’s Liz Carpenter Award for the Best Scholarly Book on the History of Women and Texas. Her article “Traveling the Wrong Way down Freedom’s Road: Black Women and the Texas Revolution” was included in the edited volume, Women and the Texas Revolution (University of North Texas Press, 2012), which won the 2012 Liz Carpenter Award.
Nivea Earl is an entrepreneur and hair braider from Pine Bluff, She owns Twistykinks hair braiding salon in Jacksonville and has practiced the African-style art of twisting and braiding hair for at least 16 years. She was the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit arguing that Arkansas’ occupational licensing of hair braiders is unconstitutional.
Sondra Gordy was a professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. She taught Arkansas History. She did graduate work in history at the University of Arkansas and earned her Doctorate of Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “The Lost Year” has become her most important project. She has conducted over one hundred interviews with former black and white teachers and students of the period. She has shared this and other research at various national, and state conferences and at workshops for teachers.
John A. Kirk joined the UALR Department of History as chair and George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History in 2010. He was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, in the United Kingdom, and holds an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in American History from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Kirk taught at the University of Wales, Lampeter (1994-99) and Royal Holloway, University of London (1999-2010) before coming to UALR. Dr. Kirk’s research focuses on the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, the South, and Arkansas, and the history of post-New Deal southern politics, society and culture. He has published five books and written in a wide variety of journals, edited book collections, and popular history magazines including BBC History, History Today and Historically Speaking. He has won a number of awards for his research including the F. Hampton Roy Award (1993) from the Pulaski County Historical Association, and the Walter L. Brown Award (1994), the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award (2003), and the Lucille Westbrook Award (2005) from the Arkansas Historical Association.
Jess C. Porter came to UALR in 2009 and holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University where he was awarded with the Susan Shaull Medal for Excellence in Teaching Geography. Prior to UALR, Dr. Porter taught at Oklahoma State University, developed and implemented geospatial curriculum for rural schools, worked as an environmental analyst and mapping specialist in the oil and gas industry, and was employed by an adventure tourism company in Colorado. Dr. Porter’s research interests include the American Dust Bowl, geospatial technology education, and urban geography. His research on the Dust Bowl was featured in an episode of The Weather Channel’s When Weather Changed History. He has published four, interactive textbooks in the Encounter Geography series
Fabio Rojas received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2003. His main research interest is organizational analysis and its intersections with political sociology. His book, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), uses data from the black studies movement to show how social movements generate lasting organizational change. He has also published in journals such as Social Forces, Rationality and Society, and the Journal of Institutional Economics.
