We Live with Death and It Is Ours: Black Women, Serial Murder, and Reckoning with Home

The Thornbrough Lecture in African American History 

Between 2003 and 2004, nine black women from Peoria, Illinois were either disappeared or their bodies were found discarded in rural areas surrounding the city. A local man was eventually convicted of killing eight of the nine women and is currently serving a life term in prison. In this talk, scholar and Peoria native Terrion Williamson will discuss how this series of murders impacted her community and has continued to shape the course of her work nearly twenty years later. She will also use the Peoria case as an illustration of the need to place the lives of marginalized black women and girls at the center of ongoing struggles for social justice and black liberation. 

Free | Online, via Zoom | Reserve required for attendance. 

Terrion L. Williamson is a black feminist scholar and an associate professor of African American & African Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, she also serves as the director of the Black Midwest Initiative and is working on a book on racialized gender violence in the industrial Midwest that was compelled by the series of murders she will be discussing in her talk. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (Fordham University Press, 2017) and the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (Belt, 2020). Her work has also been published in Signs, Social Text, Souls, Society and Space, CR: The New Centennial Review, and various public outlets and collected volumes. 

Presented in partnership with the Indiana Association of Historians, Indiana Historical Society, and IUPUI Center for Africana Studies and Culture.