Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, October 11, 2016 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, VRC.

Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American Art, will moderate a panel entitled “The Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography: Images from Ferguson” on Saturday, October 15, from 3 to 4 pm as part of the annual three-day Southern Festival of Books in downtown Nashville. The panel, held at the Nashville Public Library, features Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers Robert Cohen and David Carson, both with the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, and VanDiver as moderator.

Cohen’s images of unrest following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were part of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography awarded to the photo staff. In 2009 Carson was part of a Pulitzer Prize finalist team for coverage of the Kirkwood City Hall shootings, also in Missouri. VanDiver’s research centers on twentieth-century black women artists and African American artistic engagements with Africa. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on the artist Loïs Mailou Jones.

As part of its continuing partnership with Humanities Tennessee and the Southern Festival of Books, Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities is cosponsoring a special track of sessions related to the Pulitzer Prize, which celebrates its centennial anniversary this year. The panel moderated by VanDiver represents one such session, providing an ideal opportunity to explore what news is today, and whether and how propulsive changes in technology have changed how we perceive what news is and how we receive and consume it.

Rebecca VanDiver with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers Robert Cohen and David Carson at the Southern Festival of Books