Book Talk | Race and Madness: A Discussion between Antonia Hylton and Jonathan Metzl
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge for a dual book event with authors Antonia Hylton and Jonathan Metzl, in conversation with Ben Kafka.
Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an acclaimed physician and sociologist who speaks, teaches, and writes on a range of topics, including mental illness and gun violence, race and whiteness in America, health and healthcare, and diversity and structural competency in higher education. Metzl’s new book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms looks at a racially-charged mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, and reexamines how we as a nation should address gun violence. He is also the author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. A New York Times bestseller, the book is an in-depth look at why so many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them. His other books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.
Antonia Hylton is the author of Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. She is a Peabody and two-time Emmy award-winning Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. She is also the cohost of the hit podcasts Southlake and Grapevine. From 2016 to 2020, Hylton was a Correspondent and Producer for Vice Media and HBO’s nightly news and documentary show, Vice News Tonight. Since 2019, she has also served as an annual judge for the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. Hylton has won several awards, including an Emmy for the HBO special episode on the family separation crisis, two Gracie Awards for her stories about women, a NAMIC Vision Award for reporting on violence and politics in Chicago, and two Front Page Awards for special reporting and breaking news.
Ben Kafka is visiting faculty in clinical psychoanalysis at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also co-founder of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, which will open its doors in Downtown Brooklyn this winter. Originally trained as a historian, he is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012) and a co-editor of William Pietz’s The Problem of the Fetish (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He sees patients in private practice in Greenwich Village.