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UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Center Appoints Maurice Hobson
NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 9/1/09
CONTACT : LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION PROGRAM COORDINATOR, (413) 545-0162
UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Center Appoints Maurice Hobson
Amherst, MA - Dr. Maurice Hobson has been appointed to the one-year position of W.E.B. Du Bois Post Doctoral Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries W.E.B. Du Bois Center. Dr. Hobson will be responsible for assisting with creating the initial structure of the Center, working with the campus advisory board, communicating with potential members of the national board of directors, identifying funding for research fellowships and staffing, and other activities related to establishing the Center.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Center was established earlier this year and will be associated with the Special Collections and University Archives Department of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst. It will promote scholarship and public engagement with the wide range of issues in social and racial justice central to the thought of scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Disseminating its work through fellowships, colloquia/seminars, print and electronic publications, and other educational initiatives, the Center will be the basis for ongoing intellectual interchange within an extensive community of scholars, activists, and the public at large. It will bring together the great intellectual and material assets related to Du Bois at UMass Amherst: as steward of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers in Special Collections, as custodian of the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington, MA, and as home to a distinguished group of scholars in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.
Thanks to a recent $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, an estimated 100,000 items from the vast W.E.B. Du Bois Papers will be digitized. That effort is underway and selected digitized materials are available for use at http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/digital/. The digitization project will provide online access for the first time to original diaries, letters, photographs and other material related to one of the most influential African Americans in U.S. history.
Dr. Maurice Hobson has a Ph.D. in African American History from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Alabama. He has held teaching appointments at Tuskegee University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois.
Last Edited: 3 September 2009
