Week 5: Abandonment and Dismemberment: “Something Torn and New” By Dr. Mario Beatty

Week 5 (Full Lecture) Abandonment and Dismemberment:
“Something Torn and New” By Dr. Mario Beatty

Dr. Mario Beatty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University. Dr. Beatty received his B.A. degree in Black World Studies/History at Miami University; his M.A. degree in Black Studies at The Ohio State University; and his Ph.D. degree in African-American Studies at Temple University, where his dissertation, “The Image of Celestial Phenomena in the Book of Coming Forth by Day: An Astronomical and Philological Analysis,” directed by the noted Egyptologist Theophile J. Obenga, remains the only major work to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a document on Pharaonic Egyptian Astronomy. Prior to coming to Howard, Dr. Beatty served as Chairperson of the Department of African-American Studies at Chicago State University and Chair of the Department of African World Studies at Morris Brown College. As an educational consultant to the School District of Philadelphia, Dr. Beatty helped to write curriculum and to train teachers in the district’s novel and mandatory high school course in African-American history. In May 2008, he became the first African American to present a paper at the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists in Rhodes, Greece. One of the foremost American students of Ancient Egyptian Language of his generation, Beatty has also mastered Hieratic, Demiotic and Coptic language, enabling him to conduct translations of texts that stretch between the nearly three thousand years of classical African history. Dr. Beatty is a former recipient of the UNCF/Henry C. McBay Fellowship as well as a former Scholar-In-Residence fellow at New York University. He received the 2010 Carter G. Woodson Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching from the National Council for Black Studies. In December 2010, he was formally invited to deliver a conference paper at the Third World Festival of African Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. He currently serves as a Board Member for The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), and is also an active member of the American Research Center in Egypt, the Egyptological Seminar in New York, the Cheikh Anta Diop Institute of Egyptology and African Civilization and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, among others. Dr. Beatty’s research interests include the Ancient Egyptian language, history, wisdom literature, astronomy in Ancient Egyptian religious texts, comparative analyses of African cultures, the image and use of ancient Africa in the African-American historical imagination, the theory and practice of African-American Studies, and Pan-Africanism.