Food For Thought | Kimberly Mack and Laura Hetric

Food for Thought: A series of public events featuring research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.

We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can to learn about the exciting projects undertaken by our faculty.

11:00am-11:45am: Kimberly Mack, CAS Associate 2025-26, English

During her appointment as a CAS Associate, Kimberly Mack made considerable progress on a proposal and sample chapters for her critical memoir, Brown Sugar Blues: The White Soundtrack of a Black Girl Who Loves Rock. Brown Sugar Blues tells the story of how rock music both empowered and alienated Mack while growing up in a violent and musical home. It braids memoir, biography, and cultural criticism together to explore the personal and historical impacts of the erasure of Black people from rock—a style of music with Black origins.

In this lecture, Mack considers the reasons and costs of Black women’s erasure from rock through the analysis of a controversial song that engages Black women and race, sex, power, and violence more directly than perhaps any other 1970s-era rock tune: “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. She tells the story of her mom’s uncritical love of the song, as well as her unwitting participation in her mom’s fandom, as a toddler, in 1971. Alongside this conversation about “Brown Sugar” is the story of how rock music helped Mack to bond with her mom while it simultaneously, due to its sexism and racism, complicated her budding awareness of her sexuality as a young Black girl.

Noon-12:45pm: Laura Hetrick, CAS Associate 2025-26, Art + Design

Beyond Voice: Reclaiming Neurodivergent Subjectivity as Knowers, Storytellers, and Scholars

During a recent Center for Advanced Study appointment, Laura Hetrick completed drafts of two book-length projects that center neurodivergent voices and experiences. The first, Neurodivergent Scholars Speak: Reclaiming Voice in the Academy, brings together neurodivergent academics to examine how higher education can better recognize, support, and learn from neurodivergent ways of being and knowing. The second, A Flamingo Among Penguins: Growing Up Undiagnosed Autistic, is an autoethnographic work that uses personal storytelling, humor, vulnerability, bird illustrations, and anthropomorphic avian narratives to illuminate the experience of growing up autistic without a diagnosis.In this lecture, Hetrick reflects on the process of completing these projects and discusses the broader importance of lived experience as a source of knowledge. By bringing together scholarly inquiry and creative storytelling, she explores what becomes possible when neurodivergent people move from being studied to speaking for themselves.