The Zane Miller Symposium: Conversations in the City

Bringing together community leaders, city residents, scholars, and students to discuss contemporary issues facing Cincinnati.

Launched in 2016, the Zane Miller Symposium: Conversations in the City is an annual event that honors Professor Miller’s contributions to the field of urban history, as well as his more than three decades of contributions to the civic life of Cincinnati as activist, mentor and publicly engaged scholar. Professor Miller firmly believed that “civic activity makes democracy tick,” and “scholarship, history, and public history all help improve society.” Symposium events are designed to engage a broad audience, and connect critical academic thought to contemporary urban issues, especially as they pertain to the greater Cincinnati region. 

This event is a part of the UC History in the City Initiative, which publicizes and energizes the long-standing outreach by History Department faculty members and graduate students across all three UC campuses to bring urban history to the general public, as well as their efforts to bring history to life for twenty-first century city residents.

The 2024-2025 Zane Miller Symposium will feature Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of her foundational book, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It with a talk about the psychological trauma of urban renewal in America. Fullilove developed the concept of Root Shock, “the trauma stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem,” through her oral history-based investigations with Black Americans displaced by urban renewal. She will share her findings in this anniversary address while also providing an update on the evolution of our understandings of urban renewal-related trauma since the book’s publication twenty years ago. Further, Fullilove will place the history of Cincinnati’s Lower West End and Kenyon-Barr Urban Renewal Project within its larger national context.