Prairie View A&M University welcomes prominent activist Dr. Cornel West to campus on Friday, January 18 at 4:00 pm, for a Symposium: Scholars’ Voices Series,  African American Culture and History. The symposium will take place in the Willie A. Tempton, Sr. Memorial Student Center, Opal Johnson Smith Auditorium.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and author. He currently serves as a Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has taught at Yale, the University of Paris, and, most recently, Union Theological Seminary. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his MA and Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters, as well as his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

A provocative democratic intellectual, West frequently appears on the Bill Maher Show, CNN and C-Span.

West made his film debut in the Matrix—and was the commentator (with Ken Wilbur) on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films including Examined Life, Call + Response, Sidewalk, and Stand.

West has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, and Gerald Levert. His spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices (which won the Grand Prix in France for the best Jazz Album of the year of 2009), The Cornel West Theory’s Second Rome, Raheem DeVaughn’s Grammy-nominated Love & War: Masterpeace, and most recently on Bootsy Collins’ The Funk Capital of the World. Cornel West has a passion for communicating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice to a vast variety of publics.

To stream the symposium live, visit the university’s site on January 18 at 4 pm.