Tuesday, February 12
Marilyn Sanders Mobley
Location: 1:00 - 2 pm at Student Union Theatre

Topic: Not Just Skin Deep: The Cultural Politics of Race

Dr. Marilyn Sanders Mobley is Vice President for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity and Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. As the Vice President, she is responsible for strategic leadership of the university’s efforts to advance diversity and inclusive excellence for faculty, staff and students.  Appointed to her Cabinet-level position in 2009 by President Barbara R. Snyder, she led the effort to develop CWRU’s first university-wide diversity strategic action plan and has received recognition for her work from the Commission on Economic Inclusion, the Women of Color Foundation, and Insight into Diversity. 

An alum of CWRU, Dr. Mobley is the author of Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative and “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: The Scandal that Disturbed Domestic Tranquility” in Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere. She has edited two books and published several essays.  A Toni Morrison scholar and former president of the Toni Morrison Society, she currently serves as Vice Chair of the Toni Morrison Society Advisory Board.  

Prior to her appointment as the inaugural Vice President for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity at CWRU, she served as Provost at Bennett College for Women.  Prior to that appointment, she served as Associate Provost of Educational Programs and tenured associate professor at George Mason University, where she founded and served as first director for the African American Studies program, as a member of the English Department faculty and as a member of the Diversity Research Group.  At GMU, she received the Margaret Howell Award for Diversity and the first Sojourner Truth Award for scholarship and leadership at the intersection of race and gender as well as awards from the Virginia Council on the Arts, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  She led a study tour to Kenya in 1993 and has presented her research and scholarship in the US, Canada, Russia, France, England, and Austria. 

She is the mother of two sons, the grandmother of three grandsons and a member of Delta Sigma Theta, Incorporated.  She serves on the board of trustees for the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation and Women of Hope, a non-profit devoted to assisting formerly incarcerated women with re-entry into their communities.  Called to the ministry in 2001, Dr. Mobley began divinity studies at Howard University School of Divinity and currently serves as a lay minister at Arlington Church of God in her hometown of Akron, Ohio. 

Toni Morrison story,"Recitatif"