Thursday, February 19, 2026
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EST
Hayden Hall 221
The Barrs Conversation Series will be featuring work from Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Penguin/Random House, 2025) and Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper, 2025) with special guest moderator Meg Heckman, professor of journalism and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies executive committee member. They will present their books and discuss public humanities, public history, and archives.
Caleb Gayle is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism with a joint appointment in Africana Studies (CSSH). He is an award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity. A senior fellow at Northeastern’s Burnes Center for Social Change, he holds fellowships from New America, PEN America, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of We Refuse to Forget. Winner of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, TIME, The Guardian, Guernica, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, among many other publications. His nonfiction work has been recognized as part of the Notable Essays Collection of the 2019 Best American Essays. Read more here.
Carla Kaplan, a professor of English, African-American and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, holds the Davis Distinguished Professorship in American Literature and writes on modern, African-American, and women’s history and culture. She has published seven books, including the award-winning Miss Anne in Harlem: the White Women of the Black Renaissance (HarperCollins) and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday/Anchor), both New York Times Notable Books, and writes occasionally for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Slate, and The Nation. Kaplan founded the Northeastern Humanities Center and has been a resident fellow at numerous humanities centers and institutes, including the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York City Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. Read more here.
Meg Heckman is an award-winning writer, educator and scholar who pursues two distinct research streams: feminist media history and contemporary local news sustainability. Her historical work centers on uncovering the overlooked contributions of women in journalism. Heckman is the author of Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which examines how the career of newspaper publisher and conservative activist Nackey Scripps Loeb foreshadowed the modern hyperpartisan media ecosystem. She is also involved in several ongoing projects that explore how AI and other computational methods can help surface more inclusive historical narratives. Read more here.
