For the past 17 years, Ivy Tech Community College Kokomo has presented “Doing the Dream: A Cultural Celebration” honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Each year offers a daytime convocation for high school and college students, featuring a keynote speaker who is nationally known. There is also an evening banquet where the community is invited.
The 2022 Doing the Dream speaker was Dr. Tricia Rose. Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City, Tricia Rose graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies. She has taught at NYU, and UC Santa Cruz and is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Rose also serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. In addition to her duties at Brown, Professor Rose is a former board member of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change and Black Girls Rock, Inc.
Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post Civil Rights Era Black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She has been awarded for her teaching and has received several scholarly fellowships including ones from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Association of University Women.
She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is considered foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995, was voted among the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as one of its "Top Books of the Twentieth Century."
For the past 17 years, Ivy Tech Community College Kokomo has presented “Doing the Dream: A Cultural Celebration” honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Each year offers a daytime convocation for high school and college students, featuring a keynote speaker who is nationally known. There is also an evening banquet where the community is invited.
Past speakers include:
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
