Speakers

 

Terrie Williams

Keynote

Our keynote speaker for the conference will be Ms. Terrie Williams, bestselling author and marketing and public relations expert. She is president of one of the most powerful black marketing and public relations agencies. She was recently featured in Essence magazine, in which she discussed her battle with depression. The 2005 article received the largest reader response in Essence history. Williams, who also has a Masters in social work, tells the untold story of depression among African Americans in her upcoming book, in which she also includes stories from celebrities, as well as ordinary people and psychologists, who want to help break the taboo of depression.

 

Vershawn Young

Vershawn comes to UI Rhetoric from the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he studied with Walter Benn Michaels, Gerald Graff, and Ralph Cintron.
He is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first, tentatively titled, Your Average Nigga: Language, Literacy and the Rhetoric of Blackness, seeks to answer why education aggravates the gap between the black under class and the black middle class. An essay from this manuscript is forthcoming in College Communication and Composition sometime in 2004.

His second project, which is closely related to the first, looks at how the class division in black communities is predicated upon what he calls the burden of racial performance. Vershawn examines this burden—how it is predicted and fulfilled—in twentieth century African American literature, including drama and nonfiction. An essay from this project can be read in the fall 2003 issue of the Minnesota Review.

His teaching over the next few years will include first-year rhetoric courses and upper undergraduate and graduate courses that will focus on the rhetoric of identity (ethos theory) and African American literature.

 

Venise Berry

Venise Berry is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and African American Studies at The University of Iowa. She is the author of three national bestselling novels, So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton/Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton/Penguin, 2000) and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton/ Penguin 2002). She is currently at work on her next two novels: Pockets of Sanity and Career Women. All of Me received an Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Berry is the recipient of an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation of Des Moines, and The Zora Neale Hurston Society has recognized her for her “Creative Contribution to Literature.” For more information, visit Venise Berry’s website at www.veniseberry.com.

 

Vincent Rodgers

When Vincent Rodgers was six years old, he and his twin brother Victor got toy robots for Christmas. The robots could walk across the floor and shoot ping pong balls from their arms. "But the most fascinating things about this," he recalled, "was a panel you could take off the side of it, and you could actually see inside, all the gears and all the workings inside. After that, I was hooked," he said. "I had to see how all these things worked. I was always in competition with my twin brother, to find out who could be the smartest, who knows the most about how everything worked."

Vincent and Victor are still competing to learn about the world, but they have chosen different ways of learning. Victor became a chemical engineer, while Vincent became a physicist. "[Victor] wanted to be much more practical with his way of handling things, and I wanted to really learn what was going on in a fundamental level," Rodgers said. Vincent studies an offshoot of superstring theory, a theory that says the universe's fundamental constituents are tiny vibrating strings. He studies the way gravity works in various conceptions of string theory. He uses mathematics to describe his theories, and he sometimes takes a pen and paper to bed with him at night to make calculations. "It's fun,"Rodgers said. "I think there's some really great stuff [in physics] to play around with."

Dr. Vincent Rodgers' twin brother Dr. Victor G. J. Rodgers does research is in Biochemical Engineering. He is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Iowa. Although Rodgers and his twin brother have gone into different academic fields, they still talk two or three times a day. "[Victor is] a lifelong friend," Vincent Rodgers said. They went to college together at the University of Dayton, then went their separate ways for graduate school. When Victor was applying for a job in the University of Iowa's chemical engineering department, he heard that the physics department was looking for a new theoretical physics professor. He recommended his twin brother. Soon after, Vincent was hired by the physics department at Iowa, and his wife Padmini, was hired by the Department of Information Science. Today, the brothers play racquetball and lift weights together. "If his car breaks down, he'll call me,"Vincent said. The brothers retain some of the sibling rivalry from their childhood. "He realizes that I'm smarter than he is," Vincent said - although he admitted that Victor would probably say just the opposite. Vincent Rodgers teaches a class at Iowa called "Physics from Head to Toe," which studies how physics can apply to the human body. The class talks about how particles cross membranes in cells, how the brain sends electrical signals, and many other ways physics can describe the body. "I like learning different things which are not in my field," he said. He is also learning to play the piano, attracted especially by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. "Bach was a mathematical genius," Rodgers said."

Rodgers greatly admires Albert Einstein, who in addition to discovering new ideas in physics such as the theory of relativity, also campaigned for world peace and wrote about the society around him. In his 1950 book, Out of My Later Years, Einstein wrote about racism in segregated American society. "What can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice?," Einstein asked. "He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias." "He's much bigger than people already think he is," Rodgers said. "When you read the way [Einstein] acts throughout his life - this guy was really on it."

After his Ph.D., Dr. Vincent Rodgers was Postdoctoral Fellow (1985-1987), Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville. Postdoctoral Fellow (1987-1989) Institute for Theoretical Physics, StonyBrook NY., Assistant Professor (1989-1995) Department of Physics, The University of Iowa. Since 1996, he has been Associate Professor at The University of Iowa, Department of Physics.

More Speaker Information Coming Soon!