View map

ADMISSION:
Admission is free. RSVP below.

3 to 5 p.m.: Panels and Conversations: RSVP
5:15 to 6:15 p.m.: Keynote Interview with Professor Anita Hill: RSVP


Reception to follow. Signed copies of Anita Hill’s new book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence, will be available for sale.

All attendees are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or to have had a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of the start of this event. Verification with a photo ID must be provided at the event check-in. Face masks will be required for all attendees, vaccinated or unvaccinated. All guests must complete the Trojan Check health screening on the day of their visit to campus.

DESCRIPTION:

Click HERE to see the program, speaker bios, and theme guide.

In October 1991, Anita Hill’s landmark testimony—that her former boss, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had sexually harassed her—ignited a movement. This month marks the 30th anniversary of the hearings, and the issues they raised are as urgent today as ever. What’s changed, what hasn’t, and what needs our attention now? Cindi Leive and Dr. Salamishah Tillet, co-hosts of the new podcast Because of Anita, will host an afternoon of programming that will look at the 30-year ripple effects of Hill’s testimony. The event will culminate in a conversation with Professor Anita Hill and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College.

Speakers include:

Jill Abramson, Senior Lecturer, Harvard University; Co-author, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas

Roxane Gay, Bestselling author; Editor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO, National Women's Law Center

Thomasina Gross, Former events server, Chateau Marmont; Actor

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies, Spelman College

Professor Anita Hill, Author, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence

Gabrielle Horton, Audio Storyteller; Adjunct Faculty at USC Annenberg

Cindi Leive, Co-host, Because of Anita; Co-founder, The Meteor

Senator Connie M. Leyva, Member of the California State Senate

Kim Masters, Editor-at-Large, The Hollywood Reporter; Host, KCRW’s The Business

Freida Lee Mock, Director, Writer, and Producer, Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, and Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Words

Tony Porter, Chief Executive Officer, A Call to Men

Nina Shaw, Co-founder and Board Member, The Hollywood Commission

Dr. Salamishah Tillet, Co-host, Because of Anita; Contributing Critic-at-Large, The New York Times

Scheherazade Tillet, Co-founder and Executive Director, A Long Walk Home

Mily Treviño-Sauceda, Executive Director and Co-founder, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc.

Miki Turner, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Jessica Yellin, Peabody, Gracie, and Emmy Award–Winning Political Journalist

The event will also include a performance of “The Scarlet C” by playwright Lynn Nottage, directed by Anita Dashiell-Sparks, professor at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, and featuring USC students Dara AdedaraKennedy Hill, and Nicole Royster.

Bios:

Anita Hill is University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. After the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Hill became a leading figure in the fight for women’s rights and against gender-based violence. She has written for The New York Times and Newsweek, and her latest book is Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (since 1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. She is also an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses in their doctoral program. She is the former President of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).

Cindi Leive is a journalist, media leader, advocate for women, and the co-founder of The Meteor, a collective of journalists, artists, media leaders, and filmmakers committed to building a platform for modern feminist work. She is also the former editor-in-chief of both Glamour and Self; a cultural critic who speaks frequently about women, media, and the arts; and the co-producer of several New York Times bestsellers, including the 2018 book Together We Rise about the making of the Women’s March.

Dr. Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing and the Director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design, at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times, and the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and the recent book, In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of An American Masterpiece. She is currently working on a book on the civil rights icon, Nina Simone, for which she received the Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction grant in 2020, and the cultural history of the ‘Me Too’ movement for which she was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2021. In 2003, she and Scheherazade Tillet founded A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art to empower people to end violence against girls and women.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative and The Meteor. Co-sponsored by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC School of Cinematic Arts, USC School of Dramatic Arts, and USC Gould School of Law. Special thanks to the Because of Anita podcast sponsor Audible—and to KCRW.

Photo (foreground): Celeste Sloman

Event Details

  • Rafi Perez
  • Bitiyah Asalifew
  • Nicole Vick

3 people are interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity