Athens, Ga. – Patricia A. Turner, a national expert on rumors and race in America, will address issues at the core of individual and public perceptions of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in a speech on Aug. 29 at 4:30 p.m. in room 265 of UGA’s Park Hall.
The event is open free to the public.
Her address, “Rumors, Race, and Hurricane Katrina” will draw on her expertise in folklore and popular culture.
Turner is a professor in the African-American & African Studies/American Studies Program and vice provost-undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis. She has written three books: I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1993); Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and their Influence on Culture (1994); and Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (2001), written with Gary Alan Fine (former head of the department of sociology at UGA).
Turner is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, a member of the executive board of the American Folklore Society, a member of the California Council for the Humanities and is on the executive council for the American Studies Association.
She has served as a consulting scholar on several documentary film projects and conducted research for and appeared on camera in Marlon Rigg’s Ethnic Nations, which received a national Emmy award in 1989 for best research in a documentary. She also conducted research for and appeared on camera in his 1992 Peabody-award winning film Color Adjustment.
The event is sponsored by the department of English, the UGA Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Folklore Studies Group.
