Chesterton House presents:

Back to the Source: Conversations Between America’s Founding Documents and Early Black Writers

Thursday, September 17th, 2026
5:30pm EST
Caldwell Hall 100 or via Zoom
Dinner reception to follow

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The founding of America can sometimes seem like a mystery. How do we make sense of the ideals of liberty and equality alongside the realities of slavery and racism? And what might we discover when we look beyond familiar narratives and listen to a wider range of voices from the period?

In 2021, as the killing of George Floyd, protests, and debates over public statues brought these questions into renewed focus, Angel Adams Parham, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, sensed a need for a different way of approaching the conversation—one that returned to primary sources and took seriously the religious and intellectual worlds that shaped them.

This conviction led her through a series of transformative conversations within the past, reading America’s founding documents alongside Black writers of the same era whose work drew deeply from the Christian tradition. Theology matters, it turns out, for how we understand this mystery.

Angel Adams Parham; Associate Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia

Angel Adams Parham engages in research on the historical and comparative-historical sociology of race. She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017) which examines changes in race and racialization in New Orleans under the French, Spanish and Anglo-American administrations. The book was co-winner of the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial book award (2018); co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore book award in comparative-historical sociology (2018); and recipient of an Honorable Mention from the Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association (2018). She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Reckoning and Reconciliation: On Race, Place, and Memory in American Life” which compares and contrasts the social histories of three key sites in New Orleans over a three-hundred-year period. The book considers how it might be possible to examine and publicly discuss contentious racial histories in ways that are more rather than less conducive to civic solidarity.

In addition to this research, she is active in public-facing teaching and scholarship where she provides training for K-12 educators who are looking to better integrate Black writers and Black history into their teaching. As part of this work, she authored The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature (Classical Academic Press, 2022, co-authored with Anika Prather), and founded Nyansa Classical Community, a non-profit which creates classical curricula and programming designed to connect with students from diverse backgrounds. She is also at work on another public-facing book entitled “Conversations on American Freedom” which places Black writers of the 18th and 19th centuries into conversation with founders and founding documents as a way of deeply exploring questions concerning freedom and the American project.

Parham has published articles on the intersection of Black writers and the classics in popular outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Comment Magazine, Public Discourse, and Common Good Magazine. Parham has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and completed her doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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