In the 1970s, Saint Louis University began offering its first African-American studies classes. Now a half-century later, the African American studies program will finally become an academic department.
The African studies program at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, was established more than a half century ago. Now for the first time, it will be an academic department at the college.
Emory University in Atlanta will now bring in a group of partners to help it maintain and enhance its SlaveVoyages.org project. The website documents nearly 50,000 transatlantic passages of slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Persis Drell, provost at Stanford who favors the proposal, noted that it will not be until next year that the faculty who want to move to the department will develop a proposal that will be reviewed by the dean, advisory board, and, ultimately, the board of trustees, which must approve a new department.
Two historically Black educational institutions – Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M University – have partnered with Rice University and the University of Houston to form the Southeastern Texas African and African American Studies Consortium.
A decades-long movement at the university to create an independent Black studies department regained steam over the summer amid the resurgence of civil rights protests across the country.
The new Africana studies program will be a interdisciplinary major in the College of Arts and Sciences. Students will be able to choose from concentrations including history, arts and culture, gender and sexuality, health, education as well as race and the environment.
The program has been developed to provide many perspectives and address four pillars of education, including Africa and sub-Saharan Africa; African diaspora in the United States; North Africa and Islamic histories in Africa; and Afro-Latinx experiences.
Caree A. Banton is an associate professor of African diaspora history, who is jointly appointed in the department of history and the African American studies program. She teaches classes in Afro-Caribbean history, African diaspora history, and race. She joined the faculty at the university in 2013.
A primary goal during the first five years is to support the recruitment and retention of high-quality and diverse faculty and staff. The institute aims to develop a regional journal that centers on issues related to history, arts, culture, and contemporary affairs of Black people in California.
The Thea Bowman Institute for Excellence and Leadership, a program designed to serve Black women through academic leadership programming. The institute is named for a Franciscan, Catholic sister, teacher, and scholar educated in Wisconsin who made significant contributions to the church’s ministry to Blacks.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City announced it is combining its Black studies, Latin American studies, and women’s studies programs into a new academic department: The new Race, Ethnic, and Gender/Sexuality department.
This is the first time that an academic department at the University of Maryland will be named after someone honorifically. The women’s studies department is the only one in the country that offers a Black women’s studies minor.
Students minoring in Black studies will take 24 credits. The only required course in the minor is an introductory course with a focus on either African American studies or the African Diaspora.
Virginia State University is now offering what could be the nation’s first higher education course in the history of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. This is the first semester that the course is being offered. It quickly filled to capacity.
The Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art is collecting protest posters, circulated artist zines, informational pamphlets, and any other printed media/functional artwork relating to the movement.
The interdisciplinary institute will promote the university’s research and scholarship on topics of importance in African history and African American history, such as slavery and the quest for freedom, racial discrimination and violence, and the long struggle for civil rights.
The University of South Florida has created the Research Task Force on Understanding and Addressing Blackness and Anti-Black Racism in our Local, National and International Communities. The University of Florida has established the Racial Justice Research Fund.
The collection from the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum contains more than 2 million rare books, films, documents, photographs artifacts, and works of art related to the history and culture of African-Americans in the United States, with a significant focus on Southern California and the American West.
The staff at the Wright State University Libraries has created an online Anti-racism Guide providing campus resources, book recommendations, education videos, and more about racism and racial justice.
Where middle-class Whites may emphasize individual choice, African American values support family-centered decision making. Faith, spiritual beliefs, and guidance of a spiritual leader are very meaningful to African Americans, especially as they cope with illness and make treatment decisions.
The new minor degree program will have interdisciplinary courses aimed at studying and fostering further understanding of the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that impact the lives of Black people in the U.S. and those in the Caribbean, Africa, and around the world.
The Midwest Institute of African American History and Culture at the University of Iowa will focus on research opportunities, educational possibilities, seminars, and workshops so that visitors and educators can better understand Black history.
Sydney Massenber, an alumna at the University of Pittsburgh who is starting law school this fall, has started a petition calling for the university to require all undergraduate students to take a Black studies course in order to meet graduation requirements.
The new department at American University in Washington, D.C., will focus on six areas of study: African and African American diaspora studies, American studies, Arab world studies, Asian studies, Latinx studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.
Students in the program will explore race-related questions and study the lives of Africans and people in the African diaspora. Africana studies combines a core intro class and a capstone project with existing courses from a variety of disciplines, including history, English, sociology, psychology, and music.
Robert Steele spent 40 years on the faculty of the psychology department at the University of Maryland, College Park. He then served nearly a decade as the director of the university’s David C. Driskell Center, which supports the study of African-American art.
While some of the recollections are memories of forging new paths, other stories reflect a continued culture change on campus with stories of racism, bias, and protests in classrooms, dorms and around campus.
Recently, the Humanities Center at Syracuse University partnered with the Colored Conventions Project to host a local transcribe-a-thon of the writings of Anna Julia Cooper. The community service project’s goal was to transcribe the writing of Dr. Cooper and create a digital archive of her work.
The Pritchett Collection includes more than 1,400 African studies manuscripts amassed over a 40-year period. The collection focuses on research on the African diaspora and studies of African-descended people in the Caribbean, Brazil and elsewhere in Central and South America.
The University of Arkansas has announced that it is establishing a Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Campus Center. The center will focus on creating transformative and sustainable change in areas relating to diversity and inclusion.
The program is designed to offer graduate students and working professionals the tools and techniques to better navigate leadership opportunities within the context of social diversity and equity in the United States.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history, will chair the new initiative which will be called Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.
In 1971, the Institute of Black Culture was established after a series of peaceful protests from Black students advocating for their rights ended with 66 students arrested or suspended for occupying the university’s president’s office. Now the Institute has a new home on campus.
A new collection at Haverford College in Pennsylvania aims to showcase philosophers who are not White and not male.
Anthony Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religion, will serve as the center’s founding director.
 |
