This year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Week (MLK Week) planning committee is pleased to announce its keynote speaker for 2023: Melissa Wood Bartholomew. Bartholomew is the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) where she also teaches. She is a scholar who is earnestly committed to eradicating racism and oppression and advancing healing and societal transformation through spiritually-engaged, heart-centered multifaith and multidisciplinary strategies rooted in love.
This is a hybrid event. Attendees will be able to attend in person at the Union Saltair Room or join via a livestream on this webpage. ASL interpretation will be provided and auto-captions will be available. All requests for event access support and other questions or concerns may be directed to edi-events@utah.edu.
Melissa Wood Bartholomew is the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Harvard Divinity School. She is a Christ-centered minister and a racial justice and healing practitioner. An attorney with nearly a decade of experience serving as an Assistant Attorney General and as a legal aid attorney with the Northwest Justice Project in Seattle, WA, Melissa is committed to a multifaith, multidisciplinary, Afrocentric approach to healing justice rooted in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, restorative justice, and love.
Believing in the power of restorative justice to operationalize love and transform individuals and systems, Melissa is witnessing the impact of applying the heart-centered restorative justice approach to furthering HDS’s vision of a restorative, anti-racist and anti-oppressive community. Melissa teaches racial justice and healing at HDS. She also teaches restorative justice at Boston College’s law school and diversity and systems of oppression at its school of social work.
This event is part of MLK Week: January 14 – 20, 2023.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Week (MLK Week) is a platform for engaging students, faculty, trainees, staff, and community members in critical conversations around race and contemporary civil rights issues in America. MLK Week 2023 host a series of events exploring the reverend’s complex ideas on the meaning of love, and together we’ll examine the strength needed to choose it when faced with hatred and division.
MLK Week 2023 is planned in partnership with various organizations across the University of Utah and sponsored by 
and 