Event Details
"Peace in the Twenty-Second Century: An Afrofuturist History"
A reception with Professor Greason will follow the lecture.
The lecture will be offered as a hybrid event and recorded for later viewing.
If you plan to attend in person, please register below by Saturday, February 15.
If you wish to join remotely through Zoom, please register below.
Dr. Walter David Greason is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he has taught since 2021. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Villanova University (1995) and a PhD in history from Temple University (2004).
Greason is an historian who uses digital technologies to coordinate historic restoration projects around the world. His areas of research include urban planning, Afrofuturism, and multimedia user experience design. Greason is an author, editor, and contributor to more than twenty books, including the Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2014), The Black Reparations Project (2023), and The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024), a project created in collaboration with New York City Public Schools. Between 2009 and 2019, he served as national treasurer for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History and as a board member of the Urban History Association. He also has been a key contributor to the African American Intellectual History Society.
In 2016, after the release of the Marvel Studios film Captain America: Civil War, Greason published the "Wakanda Syllabus," which he notes brought two decades of artistic and intellectual work into a global discussion about black superheroes and science fiction. Just before Marvel Studios released Black Panther in 2018, Greason published his work on designing the urban infrastructure of Wakanda in Cities Imagined, co-authored with Julian Chambliss. The combination of the “Wakanda Syllabus” and Cities Imagined deepened academic fascination with and exploration of the ideas of Afrofuturism.
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Macalester's DeWitt Wallace Professorships were established in 1976 through a gift from DeWitt Wallace, son of Macalester president James Wallace. He and his wife Lila Acheson Wallace co-founded Reader’s Digest in 1920.
The Wallaces were noted philanthropists whose gifts generously supported Macalester as well as the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other organizations.
