Humanities Forum — Antonia Hylton

Antonia Hylton
“Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum”
This event is part of the Spring 2025 Humanities Forum

Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Antonia Hylton will read from and discuss her recent book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Madness chronicles the 93-year history of Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry.

For this Humanities Forum talk, Hylton will be in conversation with Drew Holladay, assistant professor of English, UMBC.

Admission is free. This event will be live-streamed via the UMBC YouTube channel.

This event is co-sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Minor; the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health; and the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services.

Photo by Marc Clennon.