Speakers for 2008 Freshman Convocation

Each Year the President of Texas A&M University welcomes freshman and their families and introduces new students to the Texas A&M University Community of Learners. The Class of 2012 will have the honor of being welcomed by Dr. Elsa A. Murano, President of Texas A&M University.

Keynote Address speaker: Dr. Kimberly N. Brown, Associate Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies

Kimberly Nichele Brown is an associate professor of English who specializes in contemporary African American literature and culture, black feminist theory, Caribbean women's literature, black film, and American and Africana literatures. The focal threads that weave continuity into Brown's research agenda are issues regarding race and representation (i.e., black agency and self actualization, black subjectivity, the black body, as well as questions of audience and spectatorship.

Her publications include "Useful Anger: Confrontation and Challenge in the Teaching of Gender, Race, and Violence" (in Women Faculty of Color in the White College Classroom, Peter Lang Publishing, 2002) and "Of Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification and Blood Poems: The Revolutionary Ideology behind the Poetry of Jayne Cortez" (in U.S. Women Writers of Color and Literary Theory, University of Illinois Press, 1998).