MARCH Programs
Book Club
Visiting Scholar Series
Public Talks
Upcoming Programs
Past Programs
Writing About Home: Cooper Street Workshop with the Writers House
Saturday, October 12, 1:00 – 4:00 PM
“Writing About Home” will bring community members together to think about how we engage with place, and specifically the places we call “home.” Dr. Mercy Romero, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Rutgers-Camden, will talk about her experience writing about Camden, offering her expertise in thinking about our connections to place and how those places are filled with histories and present uses that are often ignored or underrepresented.
Picturing Community: Alonzo Adams and Mercy Romero
Thursday, October 10, 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Join us for an exciting evening between New Jersey artist Alonzo Adams and scholar Dr. Mercy Romero for an interdisciplinary conversation where we consider how we engage with, represent, and share stories from different communities. After the conversation, visit the Stedman Gallery where Alonzo Adam’s exhibit “These Eyes Have Seen” is featured and enjoy a reception and continued conversation.
MARCH Book Club: Toward Camden
Sunday, October 6, 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Our fall selection of the MARCH Book Club will be Toward Camden by Mercy Romero. During the first hour, participants will discuss the book in small groups and identify questions they would like to explore with Romero, who will join for the second half of the evening. From 6 – 7 PM Romero speak on the inspiration for, research process of, and important ideas that have emerged from writing about and in Camden before taking questions from the audience and signing books at the conclusion of the event.
Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar Keynote Address by Mercy Romero
Wednesday, October 2, 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar Mercy Romero will deliver a Keynote Address on doing research in and about Camden, NJ. Join us for a conversation where Romero will discuss her experience doing research for her book Toward Camden, and her perspective, both as a scholar and former resident of the city, on how academics can engage in research in and about communities. We look forward to a lively conversation amongst research students (both undergraduate and graduate), faculty, staff, and members of the community.
MARCH Book Club: The Home Place
Sunday, July 7, 6:00 – 7:00 PM
Join us for our midsummer selection of the MARCH Book Club in reading and discussing The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham, a deeply moving meditation on nature, identity, place, and Black identity in the rural South.
MARCH Book Club: How Far the Light Reaches
Sunday, April 28, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Join MARCH for our spring session of the book club where we’ll discuss How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler, and enjoy a Q-and-A session with the author. How Far the Light Reaches is an eco-memoir that weaves the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age.
Visiting Scholar Series: A Day with Sara J. Grossman
Wednesday, February 28, 11:20 AM – 3:00 PM
In this workshop, we will push against the notion that weather and climate knowledge is best rendered through numerical data. Instead, we will experiment with a form of weather rendering that utilizes cyanotype printing and the gathering of earth materials in the creation of a “local weather record.”
MARCH Book Club: Upstream
Sunday, December 10, 6:00 – 7:00 PM
Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.
Dog Feelings: From Animal Stories to Therapy Animals
Wednesday, December 6, 11:00 – 12:20 PM
Dr. Jillian Sayre will talk about her recent article “But for his dog: Companion Animals in American
Frontier Narratives” and what we can learn from dog stories and animal kinship. As part of this talk, the Office of Disability Services will talk about Robeson Library’s “Woof Wednesday” therapy dog program and participants will be able to engage with and think about therapy dogs in conversation with Dr. Sayre’s research.
Encountering Death: Mourning in Philosophy and Cultural Practice
Tuesday, November 14, 4:30 – 5:30 PM
Join MARCH Director Jillian Sayre, alongside Kipp Gilmore-Clough, for their lecture “Encountering Death: Mourning in Philosophy and Cultural Practice,” part of the Death Under Glass exhibit at the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (RCCA).
MARCH Book Club: Gathering Moss
Sunday, October 22, 6:00 – 7:00 PM
In Gathering Moss, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches about mosses and their communities but also encourages readers to think differently about their own relationships to the natural world. What can we learn about ourselves and the world around us by looking closely and thinking carefully about parts of our environment that we tend to ignore or take for granted?