The Faculty-Graduate seminar is an intimate intellectual community that comes together to discuss work in progress around a common theme across a wide range of disciplines. Our goal is to establish a small but intellectually diverse and committed group of scholars who will attend all meetings and engage in sustained discourse during the year. Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes followed by dinner. Given these goals and the limited meeting space, we will be accepting only twelve (12) graduate students into each semester’s seminar. We encourage graduate students to commit to both semesters and preference for spring registration will be given to students engaged in the fall seminar. Participation in the African American Studies’ Faculty-Graduate Seminar for one academic year or the equivalent (two semesters) will fulfill one of the requirements for the AAS Graduate Certificate

The Black 1980s: Promises of Inclusion, Perils of Access

From the end of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to the mid 1990s, Black life in the United States and beyond underwent profound political, social and economic changes.  These transformations have been buried under the language of “post-civil rights era”, telling us little of how that aftermath was experienced in Black communities and among Black people. It remains a period seemingly impervious to historical treatment and understanding. The purpose of our speaker series is to bring light to the tumultuous time of twilight of the twentieth century. Black political thought and struggle did not end with “the sixties” but it changed dramatically, often fractured along the lines of class and gender. The ‘War on Drugs’, demonization of single Black mothers, rising Black poverty and an incipient war on social welfare uneasily co-existed with a historic rise in Black political representation and the emergence of a small but significant Black elite. It was also a quizzical time in terms of the explosion of Black cultural production. Even as Black poor and working-class people were deeply reviled by those in power, Black culture dominated American society.  We seek to understand these developments, their contradictions, and the wide variety of responses they provoked. 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Joshua Guild are the AY25 Fac-Grad Seminar Faculty Conveners.

Meet The Speaker

Saida Grundy is a feminist sociologist of race & ethnicity and Associate Professor of Sociology, African American & Black Diaspora Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Boston University. Her research to date has focused upon formations and ideologies of gender and racialization within the Black middle class–specifically men. Using in-depth interviews, her current work examines graduates of Morehouse College, the nation’s only historically Black college for men. Quite simply, this work asks how, in light of an ongoing national climate and discourse about young Black men “in crisis,” the men of Morehouse experience racialization and the process of “making” manhood at an institution that frames Black male elites as the solution to the crisis and the rightful representatives of the racial agendas. Her most recent

book, Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (University of California Press, 2022), expands upon this work.

Saida’s research interests currently span examinations of masculinity and “social justice capitalism,” racialized rape culture, and bridging hegemonic masculinity theories to our understandings of campus sexual assault. Her work has been supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Social Science research Council, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

As a trained political historian, Leah Wright Rigueur's scholarship and research expertise include 20th Century United States political and social history, Modern African American history, with an emphasis on race and political ideology, the American Presidency and presidential elections, policies and civil rights movements, and protest and unrest in the United States. Rigueur’s award-winning book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power, covers more than four decades of American political and social history, and examines the ideas and actions of black officials and politicians,

 from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential ascent in 1980.