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.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Libraries has acquired the complete personal archive of internationally renowned modernist painter Beauford Delaney (1901–1979). Delaney was a member of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the leading modernist painters of his time.
Four undergraduate fellows from Howard University in Washington, D.C., will come to the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles this June for an immersive six-week academic research program that explores the crucial role of race, ethnicity, and politics in society.
Louisiana State University has acquired The Wyatt Houston Day Collection of Poetry by African Americans. This collection of more than 800 works includes poetry from the 18th century, the Harlem Renaissance, and later works including up to the present.
In 2020, alumni of San Diego State University donated their John Coltrane Memorial Black Music Archive to the university. Later the university requested $500,000 from the donors to properly handle the collection. The university has now decided not to accept the donation.
In outlining the scope of the new department, the faculty committee acknowledged that the core subjects of race, diaspora, and indigeneity are “contested concepts and categories.” Bringing them together will create new opportunities for field-defining research to advance understanding of these concepts, generate new research agendas and train a new generation of scholars.
The center, founded and directed by Black history education scholar LaGarrett King, will use research, teacher professional development, networking, and advocacy to answer the enduring question: What is Black history education?
Before coming to San Diego State University in 2021 as the Charles Bell Faculty Scholar, Dr. Gamble was a faculty member and dean of student success at Oakwood University in Alabama. Earlier, he was the school psychology program coordinator and instructor at California State University, Long Beach.
President Carmen Twillie Ambar said that “this new center will ensure that Oberlin is consistently contributing to the national conversation on race. The center will bring together academic opportunities, co-curricular experiences, career programming, mentorship, community building, and civic engagement.”
The University of Denver has established a new Living and Learning Community within the School of Engineering and Computer Science that will focus on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Ethics in Technology. Ten first-year students are living together and taking courses together.
Dr. Williams is an associate professor of African American history in the department of history and anthropology at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Her teaching and research interests include: African American intellectual history, gender in U.S. history, and race/ethnicity studies.
The new center will be dedicated to research and scholarship around racism and racial bias. It will be housed within the Social Science Research Institute, which aims to foster research addressing critical human and social problems.
The Center for Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform’s stated mission is to advance legal equity, access to justice, and fairness in Arkansas and the region. In addition, the Center will focus on specific criminal justice research projects while offering workshops and educational events for the legal community and the community as a whole.
The Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive has acquired the papers of Paulin Vieyra, the first French-speaking sub-Saharan African to direct a film. Vieyra was born in 1925 in Benin and grew up in Senegal and was educated in Paris. In 1955, he directed the film Afrique sur Seine.
The department of African-American studies at Georgia State University has been renamed the department of Africana studies, reflecting a global approach to teaching and research in the department, as well as national trends in academia, according to the university.
The center will support teaching, research, and creative work on the history, culture, and struggles of people of African descent and provide a platform to build on the work of the more than 25 CU Boulder faculty members already making contributions to African and African American studies. Professor Reiland Rabaka will direct the new center.
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.
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