Denetra Hampton to deliver Connell School Pinnacle Lecture

Nurse, Navy veteran, and filmmaker Denetra Hampton will be the Dr. Maureen P. McCausland Pinnacle Keynote Speaker at the Connell School of Nursing’s spring Pinnacle Lecture on March 27 at 5 p.m. in the Yawkey Center Murray Room.

Hampton is the founder of For Nurses By Nurses Productions, a media platform that includes a leadership initiative, digital nursing and health science library, and film production company. Her work is focused on bridging gaps in health inequities through scientific storytelling.

Prior to her address, there will be a 4 p.m. screening of her film The Black Angels: A Nurse’s Story, which tells the story of Black nurses in the 1940s who risked their lives to care for patients with tuberculosis—an incurable disease at that time—after white nurses refused to do so.

Hampton’s other films include The First Four, about the first African American nurses to graduate from Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses; Year of the Nurse and Midwife; Racism in Nursing: The African American Nursing Experience; and The Dixie 3: A Story on Civil Rights in Nursing.

Each semester, the Connell School invites a recognized leader to campus to speak on an issue at the forefront of health care. Hampton’s lecture and the film screening are free and open to all Boston College students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as preceptors and practitioners.

Hampton is a former United States Naval Nurse Corps Officer who served in the Navy for 22 years. She earned a master’s in health services administration from Strayer University and a bachelor of science in nursing from Hampton University. She is a member of the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Hampton’s Pinnacle Lecture will be followed by an audience Q&A. To register for the event, or learn more about the lecture series, visit the Pinnacle website.