Micki McElya

Liberation Summer: A Book Launch with Micki McElya

Posted on by

UCHI at 25 presents, "Liberation Summer, a book launch with Micki McElya, professor of history, UConn." October 6, 4:00pm, Heritage Room, HBL 4th floor.

Liberation Summer: A Book Launch

a UCHI at 25 event

Micki McElya (Professor, History, UConn)

Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4:00pm, Heritage Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor

Join us for a celebration of the publication of former UCHI fellow Micki McElya’s new book, Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women’s Movement and the Future of American Politics (Simon & Schuster).

In the dying days of the summer of 1968 Atlantic City was the site of the first Miss Black America Pageant, mounted to protest its “lily-white” sister competition, as well as raucous actions from women’s liberationists. For just a few hours, the boardwalk became a site of vigorously contested ideas—ideas that would redefine the women’s movement and reverberate across American culture.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Micki McElya unfolds the full scope of this history, detailing the shocking injustices and passionate debates that led to the demonstrations, as well as the broader social and political landscape that gave rise to iconic women on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

After the talk, Professor McElya will be available to sign copies of her book. Light refreshments will be served.

In addition to the book launch, the UConn Humanities Institute and the Africana Studies Institute will host a joint read-along of Liberation Summer, open to faculty and graduate students, culminating in a collaborative discussion of the book on Wednesday February 17th. Sign-up sheets and free copies of the book will be available at Professor McElya’s talk on October 6th. While supplies last, copies will also be available for pickup at UCHI and the Africana Studies Department from October 7th onwards.

Micki McElya is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, specializing in the histories of women, gender, race, and sexuality in the United States from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. Her book The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received a number of other accolades; her 2007 book, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America was the cowinner of a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. McElya has written for The Atlantic and Boston Review, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, The Nation, Elle, and more. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and New York University and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Photography disclaimer

Photographs may be taken at this event and posted on social media or otherwise used for communication purposes.

Support UCHI

For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

Posted on by

The Faculty Success Initiative Presents, Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application, with former UCHI fellows Micki McElya, Debapriya Sarkar, and Anna Ziering. virtual panel discussion. November 2, 2:00pm.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Faculty Success Initiative presents:

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

with Micki McElya (History, UConn)
Debapriya Sarkar (English, UConn)
and Anna Ziering (Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Oglethorpe University)

November 2, 2023, 2:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register

This panel discussion will feature advice from UCHI alums who occupy the ranks of senior faculty, mid career faculty and junior faculty in the humanities who have been successful in writing grant and fellowship proposals. Please be sure to bring along the first page of a draft of your own proposal (even in the very early stages) for workshopping and feedback.

Micki McElya is a professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2021–2022.

Debapriya Sarkar is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2019–2020.

Anna Ziering is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oglethorpe University. She was a UCHI Graduate Research Scholar in 2021–2022.

Fellow’s Talk: Micki McElya on Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

Posted on by

2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in teh Black Freedom Movement. Professor of History Micki McElya. March 9, 2022, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

Micki McElya (Professor, History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually.

This talk examines the centrality of beauty pageants—of the celebratory display and competitive assessment of the appearance and deportment of Black girls and women—to the diverse range of Black politics, activist strategies, and visions for freedom and liberation in the United States from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Common to all was an investment in contesting white supremacist beauty standards, claiming the authority to define Black beauty, and harnessing its liberating possibilities. As both subjects and the objects of these investments, Black girls and women confronted an always fraught, often violent terrain of beauty’s opportunities, limitations, pleasures, and awful degradations. As an ideal, a set of practices, and as daily labor, beauty could be many things, but it was fundamentally always about race, gender, and power.

Micki McElya is professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Africana Studies Institute, American Studies Program, and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her current book project, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation will be published by Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster) and recently earned a 2022–2023 Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. McElya’s last book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum. She is also the author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, which won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Erik Freeman on the Mormon International

Posted on by

2021-22 UCHI fellow's talk. “The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890.” PhD Candidate, History, Erik Freeman, with a response by Micki McElya. October 27, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge 4, 209.

The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890

Erik Freeman (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Micki McElya (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 27, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.
Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
To attend virtually, register here

“The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890” examines early Mormon communitarianism within the context and development of transnational socialism by following the journey of four key European communitarian socialist figures who converted to Mormonism during the nineteenth century. Each of these converts’ story highlights a specific type of communitarian socialism from a different geographic region outside of the United States that influenced the growth and development of Mormonism. The experiences of these radical converts to Mormonism portray a political and cultural world that challenges the traditional understanding of Mormonism as a uniquely American religious tradition and international socialism as primarily a secular political ideology.

Erik Freeman is the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and a doctoral candidate in UConn’s Department of History. He earned a B.A. in French at Brigham Young University in 2008 and an M.A. in History at Brandeis University in 2013. Since 2013, he has served as an instructor of history at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he has taught courses on environmental history, environmental policy, American history, European history, and the American West. Erik’s article “‘True Christianity’: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France,” won the Best Article Award at the Communal Studies Association’s annual conference in 2018, and the Best International Article Award from the Mormon Historical Association in 2019.

Micki McElya received her B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1994 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. Before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, she was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama (2003–2008). McElya is currently an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Her recently published book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum. McElya’s first book, Clinging to Mammy, won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. She was named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network in 2008.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities

You Should…Pre-election Edition. Part III

Posted on by

In advance of the upcoming election, we’ve asked members of the UCHI community to suggest a book, article, poem, painting, video, or piece of music that they think everyone should take a look at in this current moment.

Micki McElya says you should read…

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994). This book has been like a warm blanket and darkly funny, knowing friend in these days of struggling to teach, mourn, write, rage, understand, and remain hopeful.

Book cover of Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird

Kenneth Gouwens says you should read…

“Desiderata,” an early 1920s prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann. At this moment, we might consider some famously wise words from a meatpacker in Terre Haute, Indiana (who also took grad courses in Philosophy at Harvard). Those who find this too earnest might at least get momentary comic (if corrosive) relief from current preoccupations by listening to the National Lampoon parody, Deteriorata.

Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Contributors

Micki McElya is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She received her B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1994 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. Before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, she was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama (2003-2008). Her recently published book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum.

​Kenneth Gouwens is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively on the culture of Renaissance Rome. His current research interests include Cultural history of Italy, 1494-1530; Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’Medici); and the distinctions drawn between humans and simians in the Renaissance and in our own era.