The Possibilities Project, under the direction of Chezare Warren, an associate professor of leadership policy, and organizations at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development “is an arts-informed knowledge hub committed to improving Black students’ well-being in education and beyond.”
The University Senate at the University of Connecticut has voted to create a social justice requirement in the university’s curriculum. The new social justice requirement focuses on the one-credit “Anti-Black Racism” course that has been offered as an elective since the 2021-22 academic year. The new requirement will be in effect beginning in the 2024-25 academic year.
The department is seeking to better reflect the breadth of its scholarship and teaching, according to the faculty’s formal name change proposal. The term “African American studies” is often interpreted as being specific to the United States, while the department’s actual work is broader.
In the fall of 2022, The College Board offered an Advanced Placement course in African American studies for the first time. The course was offered in 60 high schools throughout the United States in a pilot program. Now 800 schools are planning to offer the course. But controversy about the content of the course persists.
In 2021, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill approved the establishment of graduate programs in its African American and diaspora studies department. The department is now developing the curriculum and searching for graduate faculty. The first students will enroll in these new graduate programs in the fall of 2025.
Williams College, the highly selective liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has announced that it will begin to offer an Africana studies major this coming fall. Africana studies will be the 37th major available to students at the college. Federal data shows that Blacks make up 5 percent of the 2,200-member student body at Williams College.
The University of Pittsburgh’s graduate program in Africana Studies has announced that it will enroll its first cohort of students in its Ph.D. program this coming fall. The new Ph.D. program will offer students the choice of three different concentrations: Race & Equity, Migration & Community Transformation, and Culture & Creative Production.
On February 11, the College Board issued a statement that said, “we are proud of this course. But we have made mistakes in the rollout that are being exploited. We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander.” On February 13, Governor Ron DeSantis said that Florida may reevaluate Florida’s entire relationship with The College Board.
Ron DeSantis, the newly re-elected governor of Florida, has notified all state-operated universities in Florida that they are required to “provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory,” as well as an accounting of all state funds used to fund such efforts.
Wayne State University is launching a cluster hire program that will recruit and hire 30 new humanities faculty and create the Detroit Center for Black Studies. The initiative will support Wayne State’s goal to build a more inclusive and equitable university by prioritizing faculty and research centered on the Black experience.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville has announced that beginning next fall it will offer a master’s degree program in Black scared music. The university states that this will be first degree program of its kind in the United States.
The nine-course major will consist of three required courses and six electives. Currently, there has been a five-course concentration in Africana studies that consists of two required courses and three electives. With the addition of African studies as a major, the concentration will be eliminated by 2026.
The new Black studies department will work in close collaboration with the university’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, which was established in 1986.
Last fall, Pennsylvania State University announced plans for the center that it said would be dedicated to research and scholarship around racism and racial bias. Now, after installing a new president, the university’s plans for the new center have been abandoned.
Emory University states that the doctoral program is the first of its kind in the southeastern United States and the first at a private university in the entire South. Each student in the program will receive specialized training in one of three fields: gender and sexuality; social justice and social movements; or expressive arts and cultures. The first students will enroll in the fall of 2023.
The new degree track, housed in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and chaired by Professor Shelly Eversley adds five full-time, dedicated faculty members.
This fall for the first time, there is an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. The course is being offered in 60 high schools throughout the United States. The new offering makes a total of 40 Advanced Placement tests and it is the first new subject added since 2014.
In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His death sentence was later overturned and he was given a life sentence without parole. While in prison, Abu-Jamal has written extensively on the failures of the U.S. criminal justice system.
Who was the first African American student at Harvard? This question is not as easy to answer as one might think – and, with the recent discovery of a name buried in an 1841 Harvard catalogue, a new possible answer has come to light.
The law school’s CRT Forward Tracking Project is the first in the United States to precisely identify, catalog, and contextualize these efforts at the local, state, and federal levels.
The Center for the Study of African American Preaching at Anderson University in South Carolina will have two missions: developing significant new scholarship regarding the use of preaching in the Black church and creating a publicly available online library of audio recordings of well-known African American preachers.
Meredith McGill, chair of the department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Jacqueline Goldsby, a professor of English, African American studies, and American studies at Yale, are developing a digital database dedicated to the study of Black-authored and Black-published books, magazines, and newspapers.
Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of the African American studies department at Emory University in Atlanta, has announced that the first cohort of Ph.D. students in African American studies will begin the program in the fall of 2023. It will be the first doctoral program in the field in the southeastern United States.
Oxford University Press has announced that it is embarking on a project to create the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been named editor-in-chief of the project.
The department of African American studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has voted unanimously to rename the department to Black studies. The process of officially renaming the department could take as long as a year.
The six-course minor can complement any major, as it broadens and deepens knowledge of the Americas. Students will be able to select courses from a variety of topics including literature, Spanish, education, history, philosophy, religion, and sociology.
The Mary and Fred Easter Endowment for Africana Studies, named for two scholars whose work at the college had a significant impact on the Black student experience beginning in the late 1960s, will provide funds to support and enhance the student academic experience through research, conferences, guest speakers, and other initiatives.
The multidisciplinary program combines a variety of innovative approaches and methods to study the relationships between media, culture, and racial politics on people of African descent.
Grammy award-winning producer and Winston-Salem native Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit and renowned poet Brenda Marie Osbey, former poet laureate of the state of Louisiana, will join the Wake Forest University African American studies program as professors of practice for the 2022-2023 academic year.
The Social Justice Reporter will publish scholarship focusing on social justice, civil rights, and public interest lawyering by leading researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and law students.
The Marta F. Kauffman ’78 Professorship in African and African American Studies will support a distinguished scholar with a concentration in the study of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
Bryn Mawr College, the highly rated liberal arts college for women in Pennsylvania has instituted a new ‘Power, Inequity, and Justice’ requirement that will be in place when the Class of 2027 arrives on campus in August 2023.
Over the past several years, the number of students signing up for the African American studies minor each year at Boston University has grown from a handful to more than 40 at one point. Now beginning this fall, students at Boston University will be able to major in African American and Black diaspora studies.
The Hip Hop Initiative at UCLA will include artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships, and more.
For students at Michigan State who choose to major in African American Studies, three concentrations are offered: Communities in Action; Creative Expression, Culture, and Performance; and Black Institutions, Sustainability, and Statecraft.
Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries are now home to a rich collection of research materials from the life and career of Yusef A. Lateef, a Grammy-winning musician who played a pioneering role in bringing Middle Eastern and Asian sounds to American jazz.
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