This annual lecture offers an opportunity for the Princeton community to reflect on the current and future direction of the field of African American Studies. Its aim is to bring scholars who are thinking at the cutting edge of the discipline and who are taking up vexing questions about its past, current, and future trajectories. The lecture exemplifies the role of the department as a model for African American Studies for the 21st century.
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Silos, Silences, Solidarities and the (Im)possibilities of Thinking Pasts/Futures Otherwise.
March 23 2022
Location: TBA
Presenter: Hazel V. Carby, Yale UniversityIs it necessary and urgent to reach beyond disciplinary formations that silo the thought and being of black, indigenous and other peoples of color into discrete frameworks of knowledge in order to imagine and build new solidarities and resistance movements for the future?
Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and Honorary Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She is currently the Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College and has been appointed as Centennial Professor at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute for 2022-23.
Her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019) was selected as one of the “Books of the Year for 2019,” by the Times Literary Supplement and was awarded the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, in 2020. #1 of “Top Ten Books About Aftermath of Empire,” Madeline Bunting, The Guardian July 14 2021.
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From Ferguson to Flint: Race, Neoliberalism and Black Politics Today
April 5, 2016 5:30 PM
East Pyne 010
Presenter: Cathy J. CohenThe annual Reflections on African American Studies lecture offers an opportunity for the Princeton community to reflect on the current and future direction of the field of African American Studies. Its aim is to bring scholars who are thinking at the cutting edge of the discipline and who are taking up vexing questions about its past, current, and future trajectories. The lecture exemplifies the role of the department as a model for African American Studies for the 21st century.
Professor Cathy Cohen will be the fourth individual to deliver the Reflections on African American Studies lecture.
Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and chair of the department. She has served as the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and is the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Her work has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, GLQ, NOMOS, and Social Text. Cohen is the principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.
You can follow Professor Cohen on Twitter: @cathyjcohen
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African American Studies’ Visual Turn: Souls Illustrated
April 24, 2014 4:30 PM
McCormick Hall 106
Presenters: Richard PowellRichard Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, delivered the third Reflections on African American American Studies Lecture. His talk, entitled, “African American Studies’ Visual Turn: Souls Illustrated,” introduced a captive audience to works of art that reflect a visual dimension to W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks, and modeled new ways to weave African American art history and art into the teaching of African American Studies.
Powell stated, “My involvement in African American Studies, as a student first, and later as a scholar, has coincided with the discipline’s shift toward giving greater attention to African and African American art histories, to the material cultures of African peoples worldwide, and to visual matters within the African diaspora.”
Powell has taught at Duke University since 1989.
This event is free and open to the public.
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African American Studies and the Lessons of Experience
April 4, 2013 5:30 PM
McCormick Hall, Room 101
Presenters: Evelyn Brooks HigginbothamThe experiential effects of American racism–the continual lived experiences of racial insult, injustice, and the denial of equal citizenship–led to concerted efforts on the part of African American scholars to pursue the study of their people through multiple academic venues and disciplinary perspectives. Joined by sympathetic white scholars in the decades ahead, they developed a growing body of research that was, in turn, deployed in the real world as a weapon against Jim Crow. The reciprocal roles of academic work and on-the-ground activism appeared prominently on American campuses with the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s. These roles remain conjoined in new ways in the twenty-first century.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also serving in her last year as the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard, having held this position since 2006. Prior to coming to Harvard in 1993, Professor Higginbotham was a tenured member of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She has enjoyed many years as a teacher, beginning her career as a public school teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and in Washington, DC, before moving to the university setting. She has also taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Maryland, as well as holding visiting professorships at New York University and Princeton University. At the special invitation of Duke University, she taught at the Duke Law School in academic year 2010-2011 as the inaugural John Hope Franklin Professor of American Legal History.
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The inaugural lecture in the new Reflections on African American Studies series
April 26, 2012 4:30 PM
McCormick Hall 106
Presenters: Martha BiondiA lecture on the forthcoming book by Professor Martha Biondi, Northwestern University
This event is free and open to the public. This event is not ticketed and all are invited to attend.
Dr. Martha Biondi is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. Barnard College at Columbia University, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research interests include 20th Century African American History with a focus on social movements.
Her forthcoming book is entitled, “The Black Revolution on Campus.” In it Biondi examines the explosive emergence of Black Studies from 1967 to 1975 when direct action protest by African American students led to the creation of over 250 African American Studies programs, departments and institutes. Black Studies became a critical battleground as the Black Liberation movement moved from “civil rights” to “Black power.”
This is the inaugural lecture in a new series entitled “Reflections on African American Studies”. This annual lecture offers an opportunity for the Princeton community to reflect on the current and future direction of the field of African American Studies. Its aim is to bring scholars to our campus who are thinking at the cutting edge of the discipline and who are taking up vexing questions about its past, current, and future trajectories. The lecture exemplifies the role of the Center as a model for African American Studies for the 21st century.