Dr. Heather Andrea Williams and Kathy A. Perkins
Dr. Heather Andrea Williams is the Presidential Professor and Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences. She is a celebrated teacher and distinguished scholar whose work addresses immensely important and long neglected issues in American history, including the liberating role of self-education among slaves and their families,” said President Gutmann. “With broad expertise in law and the humanities, Heather exemplifies Penn’s commitment to integrating knowledge across disciplines to enable our students—and our nation and world—to understand and address society’s most difficult questions.”
Dr. Williams is one of the world’s leading historians on the experience of slavery in the nineteenth century. Her award-winning first book, Self-Taught: African-American Education in Slavery and Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), argued that education was inseparable from the fight against slavery. It used extensive archival research to retrace the importance of literacy for African Americans across the nineteenth century, from the pre-Civil War era through emancipation and its aftermath.
Her second book, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), charts the decades-long searches that followed the forced separations of African American families by slavery, especially in the 1860s and 1870s.
Kathy A. Perkins, has been designing with The Black Rep for over twenty years. Kathy has also designed throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and South Africa. In the New York area her work has been seen off-Broadway with such theatres as The New Federal Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club and in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). For two seasons she was resident designer for the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC). Regionally, Kathy has designed for such theatres as American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), Goodman, Alliance, Mark Taper Forum, Actors Theatre of Louisville, A Contemporary Theatre, Indiana Repertory, Seattle Repertory, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Congo Square, Penumbra, Writers Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, eta Creative Arts and Court Theatre. She has designed premieres for such playwrights as Pearl Cleage (Song for Coretta), Cheryl West (Jar the Floor), Kia Corthron (Seeking the Genesis), South African playwright Fatima Dike (The Middle Passage) and Elyzabeth Wilder’s Gees Bend .
Kathy is the editor/coeditor of six anthologies focusing on African/African Diaspora women: Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950;Contemporary Plays by Women of Color; Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women;Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays and African Women Playwrights and Selected Plays: Alice Childress. Kathy recently retired from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.