Deborah Mutnick Lecture

The Department of English and the Zabel Lectures present Deborah Mutnick, author most recently of No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). 

This in-person event is free and open to the public. For inquiries about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. 

Dr. Mutnick is Professor of English and former Director of Writing at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, and currently Co-Director of LIU Brooklyn Learning Communities (LIUBLC). She is the author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (1996), recipient of the W. Ross Winterowd Award. She has published refereed articles and book chapters on basic writing, narrative, autobiography, critical pedagogy, oral history, and the intersection between geography and composition studies. In 2012, she received an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant for The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project, which maps oral histories of Brooklyn civil rights activists in time and space using GIS, crowdsourcing, and other digital technologies.

She serves on the editorial boards of Science & Society and the Journal of Basic Writing and has been a member of the Executive Board of the Conference on Basic Writing since 2008. 

Chief among Professor Mutnick’s current interests are the digital humanities, oral history, ethnography, public writing, and university-community partnerships that bring the resources of universities to communities and vice versa, enabling students and faculty to engage in research, writing, and creative projects in a wide range of social contexts. Related to this work, she is researching and writing about the relevance to 21st century America of the Federal Writers’ Project created in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration.