The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State, , presents the Church Committee report in a single, readable volume, and shines light on modern American politics.

, a senior policy analyst for surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and , the Hubert J. Cloke director of American Studies and professor of American Studies and English for the ������Ƶ & Sciences, co-edited the book, a re-issue of the initial report released in 1976.

Convened in 1975, the Church Committee was a Senate investigation into allegations of illegal activity at the CIA, FBI and NSA. The final report, published in 1976, “confirmed the nation’s worst fears about the secret doings of its government,” Hochman said. It revealed the CIA’s plots to assassinate or support the assassinations of Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo; the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations against the anti-war movement and Black nationalist leaders; and efforts to surveil and harass Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This [was] a really important moment, a turning point in American understanding of the workings of government,” Hochman said. The Church Committee “comes after Watergate, and really puts the nail in the coffin of ordinary citizens’ trust of the American state.”

‘Almost Reads Like a Spy Novel’

Guariglia and Hochman edited approximately 3,000 pages and six volumes of the original report into a single edition which highlights the findings that matter the most to Americans then and now.

“We’ve attempted to curate things so that you could actually sit down and read the report through, and, quite frankly, enjoy yourself,” Hochman said. “Some of these stories that our edition highlights are really, truly harrowing, really truly disturbing, and in some cases, it almost reads like science fiction or like a spy novel offhand.”

�ұ�ǰ�����ٴǷɲ�’s , in partnership with the Galsworthy Fellowship and the GU Americas Forum, hosted a panel, “Executive Power and the Fate of Democracy: Lessons from the Church Committee at 50,” last month in Copley Formal Lounge on the legacy of the report.

Hochman, Guariglia, , a Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale University history professor, , Regents Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a former aide to Sen. Church, , a New York Times investigative reporter, and , the director of ACLU National Security Project, shared insights on the legacy of the Church Committee and the current state of national security. 

Panelists discussed where the Church Committee succeeded and where it fell short, abuses committed by American intelligence, accumulation of power, public perception of these institutions and the tense relationship between security and freedom in the U.S.

“While the committee recognized that security is critical to liberty — it’s hard to argue that it’s not — it made a very strong claim that the balance by the late 1960s had fallen out of whack, and their hope was to rebalance the scales,” Hochman said. “Did they achieve that? I mean, look around you. I say not. But we’re better for trying.”

‘The Gold Standard’

For civil rights or anti-war activists, much of the report would have simply verified what they had already suspected. Some of the details, however, were explosive and “bombshell stories” to the American public, said Hochman.

The report uncovered efforts to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into dying by suicide; the use of wiretapping and surveillance to monitor American citizens, including King; plans to assassinate Fidel Castro using everything from poison pens and cigars to exploding seashells; and the CIA’s efforts to experiment with illegal drugs on non-consenting human subjects under project MKUltra.

The Church Committee “is still held up as the gold standard of bipartisan investigative work,” Hochman said.

The committee put these atrocities on the public, official record, which has been beneficial for our understanding of the complex relationship between citizens and state. For historians, “it’s the Holy Grail,” said Hochman.��

In the aftermath of the initial Church Committee, the White House banned foreign assassinations and covert action. Congress convened new subcommittees to oversee the CIA, FBI and NSA. In 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed, establishing guidelines for intelligence work in the U.S.��

The report also “helped sow further seeds of distrust” across the political spectrum after Watergate, Hochman said.

The Report’s Legacy

Despite its importance in U.S. history, many Americans today remain unaware of the Church Committee and its impact.��

“Many educated readers are entirely ignorant of these astonishing stories of illegality,” said Hochman. 

Americans in the early 1970s were increasingly distrustful of the government, and suspicions were intensified by Watergate. However, “while this is a distrustful audience, I don’t think even the most skeptical of Americans in the 1970s could quite have anticipated the levels of distrust and division that we now see today,” said Hochman. 

For modern readers, it’s “impossible,” Hochman said, to hear about the committee and not think about current examples of federal government overreach and abuse. It was these scenarios that the Church Committee hoped to avoid.  

With this new publication, Hochman said that he and Guariglia hope “to give readers a fuller, more historically rich understanding of the playbook that the U.S. government has long used to maintain the political status quo at home and project its dominance abroad.”

Illustration in top image by Hana Nakamura and photograph by Everett Collection Historical/Alamy.

Immigrant groups are also increasingly dissimilar to the host society, contributing to feelings of distrust and the rise of authoritarianism within these host countries, said , a professor of psychology in Georgetown University ������Ƶ & Sciences. 

, published in January 2026 by Cambridge University Press, focuses on questions raised by the current immigration landscape. Moghaddam wrote the book with co-authors (MPP’19, G’22), who received her Ph.D. in psychology from Georgetown in 2022, and (MPP’22, G’25), a Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Psychology and Jesuit priest who received the .

From a purely fiscal perspective, that immigration boosts economic growth. “But people are not rational,” said Moghaddam. “People are driven by irrationality, emotions. Often, they are driven by fears, hatred, anger.”

Studying and researching the issue of immigration from the perspective of psychology opens the door to examine the emotional and behavioral aspects to modern immigration. 

“Why are we seeing immigration as a threat? This is a perception. It’s a psychological experience,” Moghaddam said. “On the immigration side, what are the perceptions and aspirations and hopes of immigrants as they arrive in America? That’s a psychological feeling as well. So on both sides, both the immigrants and the hosts, the key to their relationship is psychological.”

Advocating for Omniculturalism

“Immigration is inevitable, so the question is, how do we manage it?” Moghaddam said. The new book aims to answer this question.

Approaching the issue from a global perspective, The New Immigration Challenge explores challenges of managing this inevitable migration while immigrants are increasingly dissimilar from the host society. 

“It’s this dissimilarity that creates threats or feelings of threats in the host population and creates this backlash against immigrants,” Moghaddam said. “In the United States and in Europe, this backlash is the foundation for the rise of authoritarian political movements and leaders.”

The book is based on Moghaddam’s research into immigration, which he has been examining since the 1980s, and on the Ph.D. theses completed by co-authors Hendricks and Salas-Schweikart. Hendricks’ research focuses on American identity and immigration, and Salas-Schweikart’s focuses on diversity and trust.

“We often hear about immigration in the news and how much people are against it — and of course others speaking out against those who are against it,” Hendricks said. “I think the book’s focus on the psychological perspective is important because it helps to explain why this is and also maybe more importantly, highlights that it’s not just the U.S. and it’s not just ‘western’ countries. These feelings or attitudes are global.”

In The New Immigration Challenge, the authors advocate for omniculturalism.

“Omniculturalism is the celebration of similarities,” Moghaddam said. “Based on scientific evidence, human beings are much more similar than they are different, and our focus should be on how we are similar so that we can meet challenges of nuclear proliferation, human-induced global warming and more.” 

The authors argue for the idea of omniculturalism so that societies can celebrate commonalities and focus on common challenges.

“That’s how psychology can help us: by acknowledging the challenges that we face when relating with immigrants, and how we can navigate these challenges by highlighting the commonalities,” Salas-Schweikart said.

Impacts of Inequality on the Human Mind

The book was published as part of the , edited by Moghaddam for Cambridge University Press. The series highlights research on the impacts of inequality on the human mind, a blindspot in the field of psychology.

Poverty and food insecurity shape psychological processes such as intelligence and decision making. However, mainstream psychology “completely neglects” these impacts, Moghaddam said.

“If we look at any introductory psychology text, there’s a lot of discussion about the impact of different group memberships, including gender and ethnicity and even religion, but there’s almost nothing about poverty and social class,” he said.

Moghaddam started the series to draw attention to the impacts of poverty and class inequality on psychology and how these forces shape the brains of almost who live in poverty. There are in the series and one more is set to be published this February. Moghaddam is the author of three other books in the series: , and .

As the latest book of the series, The New Immigration Challenge contributes to the collection through its analysis of immigrants and poor populations of the host nation, Moghaddam said.  

“The common plight of working-class whites and working-class immigrants, that’s something that needs to be taken up,” he said. “The common theme has to be poverty and dealing with poverty, not the color of your skin.”

He is a native of Monaghan, a town on the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and his father was a high school history teacher in Ireland. Books about Irish history surrounded Gannon at home. 

“There was an element of cultural immersion in the subject,” he said.  

Gannon is passionate about communicating Irish history to audiences at Georgetown and beyond, and last month, he was awarded the (Special Recognition Prize) for his 2023 book, .��

“The highest form of recognition really is that of your academic peers,” Gannon said. “To receive this award for me personally represents a form of career recognition by the Irish academy.”

Gannon’s book suggests that the actions, activities and attitudes of Irish nationalists in Britain were essential to the creation of the modern Irish state, he said, and it has contributed to recent national discourse in Ireland.

“We are proud to see Professor Gannon’s work recognized with the NUI Irish Historical Research Prize,” said , a professor and chair in the Department of History. “This award is particularly meaningful because it validates the global approach to history that we champion here at Georgetown. Professor Gannon’s scholarship — specifically his monograph, Conflict, Diaspora, and Empire — does not just recount events; it reimagines them across borders.”

Irish Nationalism in Britain

The book and Gannon’s research findings grew out of his Ph.D. thesis at Maynooth University and involved extensive archival research across Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Traditionally, Ganon said, the actions of Irish nationalists in mainland Britain were characterized as a “sideshow” to the revolutionary events that took place on the island between 1912 and 1922. But the book suggests that Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to contemporary Irish and British assessments of the Irish Revolution. It also shows that the role of Irish immigrants was invaluable to the creation of the Irish state, Gannon said.

The book and Gannon’s arguments have earned considerable media attention and commentary in Ireland and led to national debate. Publications and news organizations like , and , Ireland’s national broadcaster, have reviewed the book.

“This thoroughly researched, well written and insightful study addresses a significant gap in our knowledge of Irish Nationalism in Britain during the Revolutionary period and makes a convincing case for a need to reframe how we look at Irish Nationalism and the Revolutionary period in Ireland,” the NUI Awards selection panel wrote. “Professor Gannon is the first to place Irish Nationalism in Britain, which until now was regarded as marginal, more centrally within the wider context [of] the Irish Revolution.”

The selection panel also praised Gannon for “presenting a convincing argument that Home Rule activists, Sinn Féin supporters and IRA activists, operating in Britain had greater significance in shaping the Revolution back in Ireland than has hitherto been recognized.”

Maintaining peace on the island of Ireland requires embracing both British and Irish heritage, Gannon said, and the book attests to the importance of the shared past, shared future narrative through empirical research.

�ұ�ǰ�����ٴǷɲ�’s Irish History

When Gannon received a in 2022, he chose to come to Georgetown because of the Global Irish Studies program and the comparative and transnational focus of the history department.

“I think the incredible breadth of research interests in the Department of History really set Georgetown apart from every other institution in my mind,” Gannon said.

Collins, the chair of the history department, believes that Gannon’s book, with themes of migration, empire and transnational identity, mirrors the wider ethos of the department, where scholarly analysis that crosses geographic and thematic boundaries is encouraged.

Gannon said he feels at home at Georgetown, and considers the NUI award an international endorsement of the value of Irish history at the university. Gannon noted that both Georgetown University founder and president were of Irish descent.

“I’m really passionate about promoting Georgetown’s historic Irish heritage, and positioning Georgetown’s Global Irish Studies as the premier Irish studies program in the world,” Gannon said. “I consider this award a significant milestone towards those aims.”

Alameddine joined the Department of English’s in 2023 and was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence in spring of 2023. He won the Lannan Prize for Fiction in 2021. 

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is about the 63-year-old Raja and his mother, Zalfa, who live together in a tiny Beirut apartment. Told through the voice of Raja, the book traces the stories of Raja and of his home in Lebanon across six decades.

Alameddine has authored seven novels, one short story collection and one non-fiction book. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is his most recent novel and was published in September. His 2014 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Alameddine has also received the , the 2025 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from and the . 

The ������Ƶ & Sciences talked to Alameddine shortly after he received the National Book Award for Fiction in a New York City ceremony. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You didn’t study writing at university. How did writing become part of your life?

Reading has always been a part of my life. I’ve been reading as long as I can remember. Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four, he asked what I wanted to do, and I said, “I want to become a writer.” When I was four, my idea of writing was writing Superman comics and Batman comics, because that’s what I read. So it was always that I read a lot, but I didn’t start writing ’till relatively late in life.

I started writing because I didn’t like what I was reading. The first book was about the AIDS crisis and the Lebanese civil war. We were in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and I did not like how it was being represented, so I sat down and wrote what I saw, and that book [Koolaids: The Art of War] got published.

Have your motivations for writing changed over time?

I always think I write for revenge, which is a very good thing to do. There was an interview with me in a magazine, maybe four or five years ago, and they put one thing that I said on Instagram or Facebook or something. And I don’t hang out that much there, but somebody pointed it out to me, and it said that I still write because I want all the kids who didn’t invite me to their parties in kindergarten to go, “Oh, my God, we should have invited him to that.” I want everybody to regret not being my boyfriend. I want everybody to regret not inviting me to the great parties. And I hate parties, but I want to be invited.

So that’s always the joke in the back of my head, it’s revenge. But primarily I still write because I want to see the books I don’t see, which is a good thing, because nobody else can do it but me. I don’t see the books that I think should be out there, so I write them. It doesn’t mean that they’re better or anything. It’s just a different kind of book.

A lot of people have mentioned the unique voice of Raja. How did his voice develop? 

That’s a difficult question, because it’s important to realize that I don’t believe you develop a voice. It’s there. You just unearth it. A lot of writing classes will tell you, “Find your voice.” And I consider that bull—-. Your voice is always there. You’ve never lost it.

The lovely thing about Raja and why I like it is because, in certain segments of the novel, Raja is just sitting and telling a story. And if the story is good, it tells itself. There are things that I did that take it beyond that. But this interview is not a discussion on how you structure it. The second section, that’s pure storytelling. Somebody sitting on a comfortable sofa and telling the story, saying, “And let me tell you what happened here, and let me tell you what happened there.” So that’s sort of the voice. 

So, if you want to say the voice is what matters, the voice is just somebody telling a story, somebody with a sense of humor. And, you know, again, for me, what makes Raja charming is that he has a sense of humor. And it’s his self deprecating kind of humor. He makes fun of himself, he makes fun of his mother. He makes fun of everything. 

Could you talk about Raja’s relationship with the city of Beirut?

Beirut is important. But every novel, if it’s any good, the setting is important. His relationship to the city is the same sort of relationship that one has with something that is capricious. It offers great solace, and at the same time, it can offer destruction. And so that when you have a capricious God or a capricious city, the relationship becomes in some ways unstable. 

I think part of the problem with this country is that everything seems to be predictable, that we forget that life is not predictable. In Beirut, you don’t know if the electricity is going to come on or never come on. You go out, you don’t know if the traffic light is going to work or not. Whereas when you live, say, in Germany or in parts of the United States, where everything is predictable, then you forget that sometimes you get a monsoon, sometimes you get an earthquake. We don’t seem to be prepared for the randomness of life.

What has your experience been of writing about the unexpected in a culture that prioritizes writing about the everyday, the mundane, the predictable? 

I’ve always felt like an outsider, whether I was writing or not. My writing has always felt like outsider writing. That does not mean that I was not respected or appreciated, but for the most part, I don’t really represent the dominant culture. Particularly when I first started, my first book was relatively shocking. It took a long time for other people to come in, and other writers, to begin to see the world the way that I do. But that’s normal. If you are to start writing, you will write what you see. 

What’s important to know, I came from a background where I grew up in a civil war. Then I went through the AIDS epidemic, where I lost so many friends. I started a gay soccer team, half of them died within three years. Half of them, we’re talking like 40. So there were 20 people who died. So I know that I cannot rely on anything, and still I do. It comforts me to know that when I press this button, the computer comes on. 

So I started believing that, you know, everything will turn out the way I expect it to. But there’s a part of me that knows, and this is what I write about, that knows that, no, this is not it. So it has to do with how one grows up. When I get too comfortable, I start getting depressed without knowing why. Usually it’s because I’m in my head, and I’m at home all the time. So I start thinking, “Oh, my troubles are like the biggest thing.” But it’s important I put myself in situations where I remind myself that life is not predictable. It’s not always calm and collected.

In the book, there’s a lot of tragedy. What is the role of art in times of tragedy?

Let’s just say, this is a question that cannot be answered. There are many, many roles for art. One of them is entertainment, distraction. The other is being a witness, just recording and witnessing what is happening. And there are some that will tell you that it’s about inspiring. Literature, books have many, many purposes, and different readers use it for different things. 

What is the purpose of literature? We’ve been arguing that for generations. It’s like, was Shakespeare trying to create art, or was he just trying to entertain and make a living? And did his work inspire people to do something that they weren’t? It’s a long question. 

Usually, when I’m sitting down to write, it’s about making a sentence work. It’s about moving from one thing to the next and finally, getting a book. I don’t think in terms of, I am writing to do this or that. Once a book is done, once a play is written, once a movie is done, what happens is between the reader and the book. I don’t know what the purpose of writing is. 

In a quote commonly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, she said the purpose of life is to live it. So you can say the purpose of art is to make it. The purpose of literature is to write it. Everything else is secondary.

(Photo of Rabih Alameddine by Oliver Wasow)

Her award-winning book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice, examines how racial identity, neighborhood and school environments can shape young people’s understanding of themselves and their place in society. 

Shedd shares the books that have influenced her teaching and continue to inspire her.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins (1990) 

This book is a North Star for those seeking a model of how to use their unique biographies to generate and test foundational theoretical perspectives — “intersectionality” is Collins’ concept — and it is a perfect example of the “sociological imagination” we seek to ignite in our sociology students. Similar to the literary strategy of another shero of mine, Toni Morrison, Collins moves an often marginalized group, Black women, to the center of rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. Everyone could benefit from the insights and analyses she offers in this work.

What is a book that you revisit every year?

The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights by Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham (1995)

This book has been with me for over twenty-five years, usually on my shelf at home. As an undergrad, I was a junior year domestic exchange student at Spelman College, and we were allowed to take classes at other schools in the Atlanta University Center Consortium. I was one of only two female students in Davis’ Race and Law class at Morehouse College, and this course changed my academic trajectory. 

Davis, who retired after 40 years on the faculty of that all-male institution, would call on me first every class session in his booming baritone: “Miss Smith College, give me the facts of [insert Supreme Court case here]!” He gave me a taste of the pressures and rewards that I now know first-year law students feel while taking Constitutional Law, and it might’ve been a big reason why I decided to pursue a doctorate in sociology instead. I now teach (sans the Socratic Method); this book’s coverage of landmark Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases is both informative and inspirational in our enduring struggle for equality in this country. 

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois (1899) 

This is the book I was assigned my first year of graduate school that modeled how I could merge narratives, statistics and maps to present a fuller picture of sociological phenomena (e.g., my focus on adolescents’ educational experiences and contact with the criminal legal system). Although Du Bois has been installed to his proper place in the sociological canon in recent years, he researched and wrote this book while simultaneously navigating: 1.) immense disrespect in academia as the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University who wasn’t given a real professorship until he went to Atlanta University; 2.) scrutiny and skepticism from the Black residents of Philadelphia’s sixth ward whose lives he sought to examine empirically; and 3.) the resultant hesitation from his benefactors to accept Du Bois’ explanations of the challenges faced by this population because he connected them to an inequitable environment instead of the respondents’ personal failings.

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fannone Jeffers (2021)

I finally read the book this past year. It is a monumental debut work of fiction — it runs around 800 pages — by a poet who deftly weaves the life and words of Du Bois into the history, culture and experiences of one American family across centuries. Jeffers that she initially planned for this work to be short beach-read, but the stories just kept coming to her. I see this novel as a beautiful parallel to the non-fiction work I describe above, which is the closest I can get to a beach-read, without guilt. It centers on the central protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is educated at a fictionalized HBCU similar to Spelman College and learns about her family and American society in her quest to become a historian. 

What books are you looking forward to reading?

Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster by Yuki Kato (2025) and The Undesirable Many: Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital by Rosemary Ndubuizu (2025)

I am super excited about new books by two of my colleagues in the ������Ƶ & Sciences. Gardens of Hope is the final book we’ll read in my Urban Inequality seminar this fall, and I can’t wait to discuss it with my students. It’s an account that centers the agency and collective efficacy shown by New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This narrative of hope and resilience is just the tone I need for closing out a semester of intense focus on unequal cities. 

The second book, The Undesirable Many, examines Black women’s tenant activism in DC via a Black feminist materialism framework that I have a feeling will reveal itself as the next iteration of scholarship that furthers the intellectual work of our academic forebears — Collins and Du Bois — mentioned above. It just all comes together. 

(All photos by Oxana Ware Photography)

This movement, and the people behind it, are the focus of ’s new book, .

Kato, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, recalls noticing gardens appearing across neighborhoods still devastated by flooding. 

“I really started to notice that more and more gardens were starting every month or every year,” she said. “And so really, that’s how I got myself interested in, why are they doing this? What is this for? And what is it like to start and operate this kind of relatively larger scale food production in a city that’s still undergoing some major post-disaster recovery redevelopment.”

‘We Can Be the Change’

Kato’s book follows roughly 50 growers in New Orleans who, between 2005 and 2015, turned empty lots and blighted land into spaces of cultivation. Yet these individuals did not see themselves as activists. When Kato asked whether they identified that way, “not one of them said yes,” she said. They wanted change, but they wanted to enact it directly rather than organize around it.

To explain this approach, Kato introduces the concept of prefigurative urbanism — the idea of building the world you want to live in before that world exists, but as individuals rather than as a collective. As trust in government, corporations, and even nonprofits decline, communities increasingly turn toward self-determined action, Kato said.

In drawing similarities between prefigurative urbanism and prefigurative politics — a social movement tactic of manifesting the alternative world through direct action — Kato referenced the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program.

“So instead of petitioning the local school board, or to wait for the local government or even the federal government to implement some program to feed them, they decided to go ahead and feed themselves,” she said. “We also don’t have to wait for these larger changes to happen to receive the benefit of these changes. We can be the change.”

The immediacy of prefigurative urbanism allowed growers to demonstrate what was possible. But it also revealed limits. Because gardens were often maintained by individuals rather than collectives, many struggled to last. Some farmers lost access to land; others no longer had the capacity to keep the work going. The result was a pattern of powerful beginnings, followed by uncertain futures.

Access and Innovation

Structural inequities also shaped who could participate. Starting and sustaining a garden requires time, money, social networks and, in some cases, a comfort with bending legal norms. 

“To be able to start something that’s out of the existing structure requires you to essentially fund yourself,” Kato said. “There is privilege in who gets to break the rules without fearing consequences.”

Kato encourages readers to reconsider what counts as innovation.��

“So much of the concept of innovation has been packaged as something that happens in Silicon Valley,” she said. “But historically, marginalized people had to be innovative because the system excluded them.” 

In New Orleans, Black residents and immigrants have long grown food and fished out of necessity and also to preserve their ancestral cultural heritage. 

“But we were not calling that farm-to-table,” Kato said. “We were not calling that alternative food movement. It’s important to recognize that what we have come to call urban agriculture is not new.”

Civic Imagination

Some participants told Kato that reading the book offered “a good closure … a process for them to make sense of what they went through themselves over the course of the 10 to 15 years.” 

This reflection became central to the project. 

“I wanted to recognize my own growth as a researcher,” Kato said. “I had probably very little understanding of food justice and environmental justice … and I really taught myself that while I was writing this book.” 

She emphasized that neither she nor the growers were the same people they had been when the work began: “We’re all learning and we’re not really a static person.”

Building on that reflection, Kato is continuing her work through a new research-based course next semester. 

“This new project will focus on the gardens and farms in DC that no longer exist,” she said. Students enrolled in the course will be involved in data collection and analysis processes to gain first-hand experience in conducting research. 

“We’re going to interview people who lost access or have left the urban agriculture projects for various reasons, in order to understand why some gardens fail to sustain for a long term and what these losses mean to the individuals involved,” Kato said.

The study adds critical examination of when well-intended projects fail or terminate unexpectedly.

As New Orleans marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Gardens of Hope asks readers to reconsider what rebuilding looks like, who gets to imagine change and what forms of labor and care are often overlooked.��

Urban gardening, in this telling, is not a hobby — it is a form of civic imagination practiced with hands in the soil. These gardens did not simply grow food. They dared to grow alternative futures — unfinished, imperfect and deeply human.

“You have to understand those things that came before you,” Jackson said. “That’s what the people in the struggle for [equality], they knew.”

In his book Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality, published earlier this year, Jackson tells stories about Black musicians and athletes and the struggle against segregation and inequality in DC. is on display in the Gelardin Center on the first floor of Lauinger Library until Jan 12, 2026.

The athletes and musicians of Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience take complex ideas and apply them in ways that are understandable, and that’s “the most difficult thing to do,” said Jackson. Throughout the book and exhibit, Jackson hopes to do something similar. 

Over 160 members of the Georgetown and DC community, including Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, gathered in the Gelardin Center on the first floor of Lauinger Library last month for the opening reception of the exhibition. Photos and stories from Jackson’s book are featured in the exhibition, and both the book and exhibit highlight the significance of music and sports in the life of African Americans living in DC and their fight for equality.

“Music and sports won’t free you, but they can be a balm in Gilead. There is a balm in Gilead to soothe the sin-sick soul,” Jackson said at the reception, referencing a chorus of the African American spiritual, “There Is a Balm in Gilead.”

The reception was co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Office of the President, Georgetown University Music Program, the Department of History, Georgetown Humanities Initiative and Georgetown Athletics. 

, dean of the library, , a professor of music and chair of the Department of Performing Arts and Jackson himself each gave brief remarks. A trio of jazz musicians led by , director of jazz studies at Georgetown, on piano and featuring on bass and on trumpet played music from DC greats afterward.

The idea for the exhibit came from the relationship between Jackson and library employees , who is the librarian for collections on slavery, memory and reconciliation, and , the head of library outreach and engagement. Photos in the exhibit are featured in Jackson’s new book, as well as in , a book edited by Jackson and Blair Ruble. Additional photos came from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution and Georgetown University Archives. 

Jackson found his place in DC through attending concerts starting in the mid 1970s as a college student. “I didn’t fit in,” he said. “But where I fit in was going to the concerts. I would go to the jazz concerts.” 

He would spend hours reading liner notes in DC record stores, and he became infatuated with musicians like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. Jackson befriended , Coleman’s celebrated bass player, and the two would talk about politics and the role of music in politics.

Jackson’s newest book is the second of three that he is writing about the city he calls home. The first was DC Jazz and the third is the upcoming book titled, Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of Black Folk in Washington, DC, which is set to be published next year and depicts the struggle of African Americans in the fight for equality and human rights from 1780 to 2020, Jackson said. Jackson uses the history of DC to voice the history of the nation.��

He is also beginning work on a biography of Michael Shiner (1805-1880), a Black man who worked at the Washington Navy Yard and is believed to be the earliest known African American in Washington who left a diary.

Jackson took four chapters on sports and music originally featured in Halfway to Freedom and synchronized them to create the book Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience.

Jackson is a celebrated Washingtonian and member of the Georgetown community. He was inducted into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame in 2009 and served as the inaugural chair of the D.C. Commission on African American Affairs. He also served as advisor to former Georgetown University president, , on DC affairs and said the book is “in many ways dedicated to Jack DeGioia.” This January, Jackson received the from the Georgetown University Alumni Association . The Council of the District of Columbia passed the for outstanding contributions to scholarship, music and public service in DC and beyond in February of this year.

For Jackson, some of the city’s greatest moments of unity and celebration were the anti-apartheid movement, opera singer Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert and when Washington NFL and Georgetown basketball teams won. 

“If we come together through sports and music,” Jackson said during the reception, “we know there will be joy, joy, joy in the morning.”

So, Harbert didn’t truly understand how his book, Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, would be received publicly until recently. 

This past year, Harbert, a professor of music and chair of the Department of Performing Arts in the ������Ƶ & Sciences, won three prestigious awards for the book, which was published in 2023: the , the and the .

“Each one has meant something different,” Harbert said of the awards. “It is certainly validating when you get a response from a book.”

Instrument of the State chronicles more than a century of musical history from incarcerated individuals at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola” in reference to the country of origin for many of the enslaved people who lived on the former plantation. The penitentiary still exists today and is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. with thousands of inmates.��

In the book, Harbert pieces together oral history and archival research to show how incarcerated individuals at the prison have found rare creative expression and a limited experience of freedom through music.

“It gives us an opportunity to think of prison as a disorganized, haphazard, conditional and historical institution,” he said.

The Society for American Music annually gives out the Irving Lowens Book Award for the book it judges as the best in the field of American music. The organization praised Instrument of the State for its “compelling narrative” that centers the voices of incarcerated musicians. 

“It opens the door to a musical world long hidden from view and prompts readers to ‘listen longer’ to the message of Angola Prison’s musical presence,” in its announcement.

The recognition meant a lot to Harbert. 

“It’s regarded as the biggest prize in the study of American music,” he said. “So that feels good.”

Each year, the American Musicological Society honors a book of “exceptional merit that both illuminates some important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context” with the Music in American Culture Award.

The organization’s awards committee wrote that, “By placing familiar stories in new contexts, we come to understand the powerful role(s) music can play in an oppressive system. Instrument of the State matters in ways subtle and profound. It challenges us to rethink old myths about the authenticity of Black music and it brings us face to face with the abomination of justice that is the American prison system.”

For Harbert, that award meant that his book was “approachable and resonant beyond the academic impact.”

“My colleague in the History Department gives everybody this advice: write for humans,” Harbert said. “So to get that prize meant that I had followed John’s advice.”

The Portia K. Maultsby Prize, given out by the Society of Ethnomusicology “recognizes the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, with the focus being African American music and/or Black music of the diaspora.”

The organization’s awards committee wrote that Harbert “approaches this project with more care and substance, doing extensive archival research and interviews and giving honor and dignity to his conversation partners, and thereby producing a book that will have reverberations across and beyond the field.”

Chloe Hornbostel (C’26), a government major and music minor who took Harbert’s American music ethnography and rock history courses, called the book an “eye-opening read.” 

“It played a large role in my understanding and appreciation of music’s ability to carry significant historical weight,” she said. “The book taught me more about the ways in which culture and expression persist in spite of social or legal hindrances.”

Harbert said that winning the three awards reinforced to him that the musicians’ stories mattered and that they’re part of the American story. After learning of each award, he would send updates to the incarcerated musicians at Angola.

Myron Hodges, a guitarist for the Angola Big River Band, wrote in one of the book’s foreword that he was “deeply honored” to be a part of Instrument of the State.

“Instrument of the State is like no other book I’ve read about Angola because it doesn’t stereotype its subjects,” Hodges wrote. “Instead, it focuses on the musical history and the endeavors of men serving time, those of us who seek to achieve a sense of purpose, meaning, peace and normalcy in our lives, using our musical abilities to captivate the hearts and minds of our audiences and our keepers.”