The 2026 Kahn Humanities Series Presents Professor Angela Y. Davis

This event is full.

BPL Presents offers a special milestone edition of the Kahn Humanities Series with renowned author and professor Angela Y. Davis—who will conduct a close reading of the Declaration of Independence upon its 250th anniversary, in conversation with Jelani Cobb.

Established in 2008, the Kahn Humanities series features speakers with an important vision for our times: thinkers, activists and scholars working in the humanities. When there is so much to keep teaching ourselves and those around us, we turn to voices and minds that give us hope and clarity.

This year, veering from the more traditional lecture format, our special guest, Professor Angela Y. Davis—in conversation with The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb—will conduct a close, even forensic reading of the document that played a key role in sparking the independence and birth of the United States and the tendencies—democratic and less so—that the U.S. helped usher in.

Davis and Cobb expand on the Kahn Humanities series, which has featured court scholar Elie Mystal, commentator Frank Rich, novelist Amitav Ghosh, author Masha Gessen, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner, former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and former ACLU President Susan Herman, among others.

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Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. Her most recent books include Abolition.Feminism.Now., written with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, and a book of essays entitled Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1.

She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex.  Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with people in women’s prisons.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015 and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Dr. Cobb has a B.A. in English from Howard University and completed his M.A. and doctorate in American History at Rutgers University in 2003. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.