Letter from the Director

As the Director of the Frazier Thompson Center for Research on Race and Culture (formerly the Initiative on Race and Resilience), I want all to know that they are very welcome. I am excited to continue the essential, necessary work of this center and the work of former director Dr. Mark Sanders, without whom neither this position nor this center would exist. I’m grateful beyond words for what he’s done and how he’s done it.

We have always lived in a time of narratives. In our Western narratives, ghost stories often work to offer instruction or moral correctives. They ask us to consider our actions alongside life’s brevity. I’m thinking of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, and Sethe’s ghostly daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In every case, these narratives are meant to teach us something about life and the world we inhabit.

I have been thinking a lot about ghosts recently. As I’ve assumed the director role, I’ve been vexed by the ghosts of history, recent and long past. The origins of the Thompson Center were in part a response to the ghosts that haunted us following the murders of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Ahmad Arbury and too many others. In the wake of that haunting, IRR was founded with a clear and urgent mission: to confront the enduring legacies of racial injustice and to foster communities that were more just for all of us.

In five years, the phenomenal staff of the IRR and its founding director Dr. Mark Sanders worked tirelessly toward that end. I am deeply indebted to Mark as well as the previous associate directors of IRR for their commitment to the important work in establishing the Initiative. Under their stewardship, IRR grew from an idea into a key component of the fabric of Notre Dame.

The work of the Thompson Center is dedicated to wide-ranging research related to our society and our humanity unrelated to any specific political constituency. Notre Dame is a place where scholarship, faith, and community come together in pursuit of truth. Rooted in a Catholic mission that calls us to recognize the dignity of every person and supported by a vibrant academic community, the Thompson Center seeks to be a catalyst for truth, transformation, and hope for a more peaceful world.

Ghosts can offer a kind of hope, too, even when we least expect it. I think sometimes of Emmett Till, the way his death mask haunted readers from the pages of Jet Magazine. When I look at those images, they allow a glance into a past that, while horrific, can also serve as a catalyst for healing. Those who do not understand and respect the past are doomed to repeat it. As a writer and a scholar, I am always hoping to learn something from the ghosts of the past. I think of those ghosts as tethered to the Ghanaian Twi word Sankofa, meaning, to reach back to reclaim that which is lost to move forward.

We move forward in the Thompson Center with our formidable staff who have worked hard over the summer to create an exciting slate of programming for the fall. I’m thrilled to welcome our new Associate Director, Dr. Korey Garibaldi from the Department of American Studies. A brilliant mind and innovative thinker, Korey is the author of Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America and serves as associate editor of American Quarterly.

I’m also thrilled to welcome Dr. Whitney Fields, who recently received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She joins us after a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Whitney specializes in African American history with a focus on carceral studies, slavery, and urban history spanning the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

I am delighted to step into this new role and deeply grateful for the support of the amazing staff in the Thompson Center. Korey and I are eager to shepherd the center into its next iteration, a future that continues to be deeply committed to scholarship and art that investigates the intersections of race and builds community. We hope to continue to advance that research in thoughtful, hopeful, and public ways. This includes a renewed commitment to our partnerships across the University, and a commitment to fostering new partnerships within our campus community as well as beyond it.

Whether you are a student, faculty member, community partner, or visitor, you are very welcome, and I invite you to join us in this enormously transformative moment as we begin drafting the Thompson Center's next chapter. We hope you will engage with us by participating with our events and research projects – so please stay tuned for exciting new developments in the Thompson Center and keep an eye out for invitations to our many exciting events taking place this semester.

Sincerely, thank you for the kind and thoughtful support I have received from the Notre Dame community and beyond as I’ve taken on this new role. I speak for everyone in the Thompson Center when I say how excited we are about the programming that lies ahead, and I am eager to see what can be built together.

Dionne Bremyer

Director of the Frazier Thompson Center for Research on Race and Culture

Professor of English

I acknowledge my presence on the traditional homelands of Native peoples including the Haudenosauneega, Miami, Peoria, and particularly the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik /Pokagon Potawatomi, who have been using this land for education for thousands of years, and continue to do so.