"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly... Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed… Our lives begin to end the moment you become silent about things that matter." —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nigel Hatton is an associate professor of literature and philosophy at the University of California Merced, a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, and a member of the faculty committee for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison in San Rafael, California. He received his Ph.D. in both Modern Thought & Literature and the Humanities, with a minor in political science, from Stanford University, and completed postdoctoral studies at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. A former Du Bois fellow at Harvard University, his published work includes articles on human rights and literature, and on writers and thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Jr., Jose Martí, Ivan Klíma and Louise Erdrich. He is an associate editor of the Journal for Transnational American Studies, part of the editorial board for the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film and the James Baldwin Review, and a co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies Book Series with University of California Press.

Kilian Ntomchukwu is a University of Würzburg Alumnus in English and Physical Education.  Since 2017, he has been a high school teacher for English and Physical Education at the Benedikt-Maria-Werkmeister Gymnasium, Neresheim (Ostalbkreis). In 2012 and 2013, he was an exchange student at the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2015, he was part of the Fulbright Fellowship program "Diversity and Integration in the Classroom 2015" at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Josephine Fontaine is a graduate student in the American Studies program at the University of Würzburg, Germany. In 2015, she was an exchange student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Panel Chair: PD Dr. Heike Raphael-Hernandez (University of Würzburg)

*This panel is open to the public, but prior registration for the ZOOM log-in info is required. To sign up, please send an e-mail request to:  heike.raphael-hernandez@uni-wuerzburg.de