Artists & Audiences for The Convert

Meet the cast & creative team for The Convert! Learn more about how they brought this epic production together!

Savage Achievement: Boston’s African Pygmalion

A century separates Jekesai, a girl in colonial Zimbabwe at the end of the19th century, and Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American female poet, living in colonial Boston at the end of the 18th century. Both are renamed; both are domestic servants. Does the similarity between them end here, or does it go deeper? Join a  panel of professors from the UMass Boston Public Humanities Collaborative: Barbara Lewis, Cheryl Nixon, Monica Pelayo, and Roberta Wollons, for a fascinating discussion of the parallels between these two women!

Barbara Lewis heads the Trotter Institute for the Study of Black History and Culture at UMass Boston, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of English. As a Francophone scholar, she co-translated Faulkner, Mississippi by Edouard Glissant, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. As a cultural historian, she has published on lynching in drama, the minstrel stage, the black arts movement, and playwright August Wilson. For over fifteen years, she wrote theater, film, and art reviews and covered the creative arts scene in New York, writing for Essence, the Amsterdam News, the Soho Weekly News, and Ms. Magazine. Dr. Lewis has taught at City College, Lehman, New York University, and was Chair of the Department of Theatre at the University of Kentucky. Expressing her interest in connecting campus and community, she blogs about women’s history, current events, and the arts for The Public Humanist.

Cheryl Nixon is an Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on literary representations and legal structurings of the family, focusing on the eighteenth-century rise of the novel. Her recent books include The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body  and Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-1815.  In an attempt to make the word of the eighteenth-century accessible to her students and the public, she has worked with students to create rare books exhibitions for the Boston Public Library, including “Crooks, Rogues, and Maids Less than Virtuous: Books in the Streets of 18^th-Century London” and “The Imaginative Worlds of Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and the Early Novel.”  These exhibits featured the student’s archival research, thematic analysis of materials, and artistic display of rare books.

Monica Pelayo is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she also serves as the Director of the Public History Track in the History Master’s program. Her academic work focuses on issues of race, immigration, and American collective memory and she is working on a manuscript, currently titled, “A Nation of Immigrant Narratives: The Cultural Politics of Memory in Postwar America.” As a public historian, she has offered her services to the the Studio for Southern California History, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and most recently to the Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the isolation and abuse of people within the immigration detention system. Before she moved to Boston, she received her PhD and MA in History at the University of Southern California and her AB in American Studies at Brown University.

Professor Roberta Wollons is an historian of nineteenth century American women’s history and social movements. She received her BA from UC Berkeley, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is currently teaching at UMass Boston in the history department. Prior to that, she taught in Japan for six years, in Singapore, and at Indiana University. Her current project, Cultural Hybrids: Women of the ABCFM in Japan, Ottoman Turkey and Southern India, 1868-1915, is on the transformation of American women missionary educators who built schools abroad in the late 19^th century.

Christianity in Africa: Then & Now

Join us for a post-show conversation with Sallie Craig Huber and Douglas Huber as they explore the evolution of Christianity in Africa from the time of The Convert to now!

Members of Saint Peter’s Episcopal church in Central Square, Sallie Craig Huber and Douglas Huber have a combined 80+ years of global and African public health experience.  They have worshipped with local congregations of African Christians in numerous countries and have a personal perspective on the unique role of Christianity in Africa.  Douglas served as HIV/AIDS advisor for two years with the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa and Sallie Craig consulted for the United Nations and the US Agency for International Development in Zimbabwe. In 1996, Sallie Craig and Douglas were immersed along with 60 other Episcopalians from the Boston area in a landmark pilgrimage to Zimbabwe to mark the centenary of the martyrdom of Bernard Mizeki, the first Christian martyr from the Anglican Church in Central and South Africa.

The Role of Christianity in The Convert

Join us following the matinee performance for a post-show conversation with faith community leaders! Cambridge’s own Rev. Paul Ford (Union Baptist Church) and Reverends Larry and Virginia Ward (Abundant Life Church) will synthesize The Convert based on their work in Christianity and provide insight on how religion alters the lives of the play’s characters.

Reverend Paul Robeson Ford is the Senior Pastor of the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His leadership at Union is focused on stimulating growth and renewed mission at this historic congregation. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College and a Master of Divinity Degree from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Theology at the University of Chicago, where his research interests focus on the intersection between prison ministry, mass incarceration, and theology that is centered on transformation and liberation.

Pastor Larry Ward has led Abundant Life Church since 1994. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northeastern University in technical communications and a Masters of Education from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School Summer Leadership Institute. Pastor Larry’s vision and passion for missions have impacted people as far as Jamaica, W.I. Barbados, W.I., Uganda, East Africa and Haiti.

Join us for a talkback with the cast and crew of Matchless & The Happy Prince directly following the performance on December 10th.