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Antonia Hylton presents "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum"

Part of the Spring 2025 Humanities Forum

Location

Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Gallery

Date & Time

March 10, 2025, 4:00 pm5:30 pm

Description

For our Spring 2025 Humanities Forum, the Dresher Center for the Humanities presents

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum


Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Antonia Hylton will read from and discuss her recent book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Madness chronicles the 93-year history of Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.

In conversation with Drew Holladay, Assistant Professor of English, UMBC

This event will be live-streamed via the UMBC YouTube channel.

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry.

Co-sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Minor; the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health; and the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services.

Photo by Marc Clennon.
Image description: A portrait of Antonia Hylton, a Black woman with red curly hair. She is wearing a black-colored blouse.