EVENT DETAILS
NOTE: In-person tickets for the Alabama Colloquium luncheon are now sold out. You can still watch our event lievestream with a virtual ticket. We also have a limited number of in-person tickets for the post-Colloquium "bonus experience" at the Wallace House. (Scroll down for details on that.) To join our waitlist in case of Colloquium cancellations, email pjordan@alabamahumanities.org.
The Alabama Humanities Alliance bestows its highest honor on Alabamians who have made our state and world a smarter, kinder, and more vibrant place to live. All through the humanities.
Since 1989, we've honored writers and historians, community builders and big thinkers, civil rights icons and storytelling legends. We've honored Alabamians who challenge us to examine what it means to be human. Who provide context that helps us better understand our past and our present. And who help us see our state's diverse communities, rich cultures, and fellow neighbors more clearly — and with more empathy.
This year, we'll add two more Fellows to these ranks at the Alabama Colloquium, presented by Regions, Alabama Power, and Medical Properties Trust. Join us as we honor a pair of scholar-author-historians: David Mathews, Ph.D., and Imani Perry, Ph.D.
The day's program will include an enlightening conversation between our honorees, moderated by CNN anchor and Alabama native Kaitlan Collins. We'll also introduce AHA's newest collaboration, Healing History. This initiative is designed to strengthen our communities and state by helping neighbor better know neighbor — across race, religion, political affiliation, and all those other supposed dividing lines that shouldn't keep us apart.
date+location
October 23, 2023
The Grand Bohemian
2655 Lane Park Road | Birmingham, AL 35223
schedule
11:30 a.m. | luncheon
noon | main program
3 p.m. | Wallace House tour*
program
• conversation with our Fellows: David Mathews and Imani Perry
• video tribute to our 2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows
• introduction to AHA's Healing History initiative
• preview of AHA's 50th anniversary in 2024
• award presentations + audience Q&A
• book signing opportunity
bonus experience*
Following the Alabama Colloquium, we're offering a limited-capacity listening tour of Wallace House, run by our partners at the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. Built in 1841, in Harpersville, the Wallace House was once part of a 5,000-acre cotton plantation, which was worked by nearly 100 enslaved people. Today, descendants of the home's White landowners and enslaved Black population work together to examine their shared history and create a space for mutual understanding and reconciliation.
As part of your tour after the Colloquium, you'll have the chance to visit with those descendants as they share their stories, and their hopes for the future. You'll also explore family exhibits and experience an open-air sculpture, Bearing Witness: Praise House, that evokes the spiritual practices of those once enslaved on the plantation.
The Wallace House experience is $50 and includes charter bus transportation to and from the Grand Bohemian Hotel, host venue for the Alabama Colloquium. The bus will depart after the Colloquium ends. Expect to arrive back in Birmingham around 5 p.m. Purchase your ticket here.
Note: Through AHA's new Healing History initiative, and in working with scholars from Auburn University, the Wallace Center has conducted oral histories with Black and White descendants of Wallace House. These histories will be incorporated into the site's future planning and public programming.
Below, see the trailer for a Wallae House/Healing History video that will premiere at the Alabama Colloquium. Thanks to Tyler Jones and 1504 for their artistry.
awards
• Alabama Humanities Fellows
• AHA Champion of the Humanities Award
• Wayne Greenhaw Service to the Humanities Award
A late fall view of the Wallace House, in Shelby County, one of AHA's Healing History pilot partners. As part of the 2023 Alabama Colloquium, we're offering a limited-capacity tour of the home, and the chance to meet some of the descendants who are working together to create a site history that includes both White and Black perspectives of the home.