Written as an Indigenous character, yet often depicted by white actors in blackface — what does the transformation of Robinson Crusoe’s character Friday say about the history of race? Join the MU History Department for a lecture: "Indigenous and Black Fridays: Race and Robinson Crusoe" on November 12 at 4:30 on campus in Switzler Hall, Room 101 with visiting Professor David Roediger. Free and open to the community.

David Roediger teaches American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Education from Northern Illinois University. He holds a PhD from Northwestern, where he studied under Sterling Stuckey. Roediger has taught labor, immigrant, and Black history at the University of Missouri, the University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota. He worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Sinking Middle Class, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Working toward Whiteness. Roediger’s The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. Roediger also has received Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the C.L.R. James Prize from the Working Class Studies Association, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Multiethnic Literature of the US. He is past president of the American Studies Association. Roediger’s autobiography, An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education, appears next March from Fordham University Press.