A Fireside Chat with Dr. Tillet

Join us for a fireside chat with Dr. Salamishah Tillet.

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About The Talk

"What is this 'Public' in The Public Sphere?"

This conversation will explore how cultural criticism can serve as a bridge between scholarship and the public sphere. Drawing from her extensive work as a writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, Dr. Salamishah Tillet will discuss how cultural analysis helps communities make meaning of art, media, and history, and how critics can illuminate the emotional and political stakes embedded in contemporary popular culture. 

Turning the attention to public art and the public humanities, this conversation will also consider how we shape civic memory and belonging. Reflecting on national exhibitions and community-based art projects she has helped envision, Dr. Tillet will examine how creative practices open new possibilities for engaging with histories that are often contested, silenced, or in flux. Her perspective highlights how collaboration among artists, institutions, and local communities can produce powerful forms of shared storytelling. 

Finally, what does it mean to be a public intellectual today? The conversation will address Tillet’s commitment to justice, care, and collective transformation by drawing on her experiences as a leader – in academia, the media, and organizations focused on gender and racial justice, Dr. Tillet will invite audiences to consider how universities, cultural institutions, and local communities can build ecosystems that support creativity, foster belonging, and advance more equitable futures.

About The Speaker

Salamishah Tillet is an academic and artistic polyglot whose work spans academia, public art, civic justice, and cultural criticism. A true steward of culture, Tillet is a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times, where she earned the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her writing can also be experienced on bookshelves, as she is the author of “Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination” (2012) and “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece” (2021), and is completing a narrative nonfiction work on the titanic Nina Simone, forthcoming in 2027.

As a champion of artists and activists alike, she co-founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. In 2021, she co-hosted the Webby Award and Gracie Award-winning “Because of Anita,” a four-part series podcast about the thirty-year impact of Anita Hill’s historic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Furthering the intersection of art and social change, Tillet has also led major cultural institutions in Newark, a city that’s long been considered home, including Express Newark — a center for socially engaged art and design — and New Arts — a public arts studio at Rutgers. An artisan in her own right, Tillet’s public art collaborations, notably "Pulling Together,” and “The Wards of Newark: Then and Now,” explore themes of gentrification, belonging, and urban renewal. Her work continues to reimagine who public space is for, from Washington, D.C.’s National Mall to New Jersey's city streets. 

An alum of the University of Pennsylvania, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with a BA in English and African American Studies. She earned a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Brown University, another Masters in English and American Literature, as well as a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard. In 2023, she received an honorary terminal degree — a fine arts doctorate from Moore College of Art and Design. She now serves as the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.   

-Registration is required, seating is limited-