Todd Duncan

Todd Duncan is continuing his oral history project on the Brewster Oldtimers, an Eastside group, and on an oral history component to complement the historical exhibit of photographs mounted by another Detroit group, the Westsiders. A $2,500 grant was awarded by the City of Detroit to support the Westsiders' interviewing. In the summer of 2001, an interview of Grace Lee Boggs, jointly conducted with Kathryne V. Lindberg of the English Department, was published in Social Text. In the summer he also helped facilitate a musical production by gifted handicapped adults at the Detroit Opera House, where as well he gave a lecture on the poet Robert Hayden, History and the Art of Recovery. Beginning in December he will serve with the advisory group for the Reuther Library web site on African American History. In February 2002 he is giving a mini-course at the Detroit Institute of Arts on Robert Hayden, Dudley Randall and Phillip Levine, and at the Local History Conference in March a talk entitled "Oral History, Boundaries: Some Thoughts on Community. Recently a working group, composed also of Colleagues Kathryne Lindberg and Africana Study's Beth Bates, was awarded $1000 by Wayne States' Humanities Center to continue an oral history project on Detroit race and labor activists from the 1930s to the present.

Todd Duncan, Lecturer  - Email:  ad4481@wayne.edu