EMU Ballroom 1222 E. 13th Ave. University of Oregon

Dr. Beverly Wright, environmental justice scholar and activist, is the founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice currently at Dillard University in New Orleans. The Center addresses environmental and health inequities along the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor and is a community/university partnership providing education, training, and job placement. Since Hurricane Katrina, the Center has focused largely on research, policy, community outreach, assistance, and the education of displaced African-American residents of New Orleans.

Dr. Wright served as the co-chair of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Taskforce for New Orleans Mayor-Elect Mitch Landrieu’s transition team. She is currently serving on the Ethics Review Board for the City of New Orleans and is a member of the board of the Tony Mizzocchi Center of the United Steelworkers of America.  She has served on the Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Advisory Board, the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Affairs’ Brownfields Consortium, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the New Orleans’ Select Committee for the Sewerage and Water Board, chaired the 2002 Second National People of Color Leadership Summit, and currently co-chairs the Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative, is a member of the Commission Delegation to the U.N. Conference on Climate Change (COP15) and serves as the president of the African American Women of Purpose and Power in New Orleans. Dr. Wright received the Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Award in 2006, the 2008 EPA Environmental Justice Achievement Award, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition 2008 Community Award, the Ford Motor Company’s Freedom’s Sisters Award in July of 2009, the prestigious 2009 Heinz Award as well as the 2010 Beta Kappa Chi Humanitarian Assistance Award bestowed by the National Institute of Science.

Dr. Wright’s lecture is presented by the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society and co-sponsored by the CSWS Women of Color Project, School of Law, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Department of Anthropology, and the ASUO Women’s Center.

Click here for: Beverly Wright Bibliography

A Lorwin Event

The Center for the Study of Women in Society presents “Women’s Rights in a Global World,” the 2010-11 inaugural series of the Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. This yearlong series of lectures, symposia, workshops, and other events focuses on the continuing struggles for women’s rights and is intended to inspire new scholarship and activism on women’s rights. It grows out of CSWS’s historical mission: to generate research on women and gender and to disseminate that research to a broader feminist community. The Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is funded by a gift from Val and Madge Lorwin to the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences and School of Law.