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Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, joined the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in June 2019 to hold a joint Luxemburg Lecture and W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Lecture at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. For those who missed out, her lecture and the subsequent discussion is now available to...
Left to right: Misty De Berry, Ajanet Rountree, and Professor Soyica Colbert
In this Graduate Series Interview, Misty De Berry (moderator) and Ajanet S. Rountree sit down with Professor Soyica Colbert during the Black Impossible Conference. Professor Colbert shares her insights on the relationship between Black Women Scholars and Black cultural production.
In 2019, the Department of the African American Studies had the pleasure of graduating the second cohort of AAS Concentrators. We have no doubt that these three scholars will continue to excel and make an impact in the world.
In this Graduate Series Interview, Misty De Berry (moderator) and Ajanet S. Rountree sit down with Professor Soyica Colbert during the Black Impossible Conference. Professor Colbert shares her insights on the relationship between Black Women Scholars and Black cultural production.
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, joined the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in June 2019 to hold a joint Luxemburg Lecture and W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Lecture at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. For those who missed out, her lecture and the subsequent discussion is now available to...
In this Graduate Series Interview, we listen in as Kirk Maynard (moderator), Steven Gayle, and Brandan “BMike” Odums explore contemporary issues from the lens of creatives and artists.
Stories have been told for almost two millennia about the Virgin Mary and the miracles she has performed for the faithful who call upon her name. One of the most important collections of such folktales is the body of almost 700 Ethiopian Marian miracles, written from the 1300s through the 1900s, in the ancient African language of Gəˁəz (also...
In Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture, black feminist scholar of religion Tamura Lomax contends with and deconstructs deeply racialized, gendered, and sexualized cultural pathologies about Black women and girls. Lomax builds on the work of Black feminists and womanists, including but not limited to bell hooks,...
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Books and Literature
In 2019, the Department of the African American Studies had the pleasure of graduating the second cohort of AAS Concentrators. We have no doubt that these three scholars will continue to excel and make an impact in the world.
The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University announces more than $123,000 in awards to support the summer projects and research of 52 Princeton undergraduates, chosen from 80 applicants.
"Today I'm coming to you live from TEACHx, an annual celebration of experiments in teaching with technology. I am truly honored and humbled to have the opportunity to speak with the conference’s keynote speaker, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights...
Donald Joseph Goines was born on December 15, 1936, in Chicago. Father Joseph and mother Myrtle were hardworking migrants from the South who had managed to open up their own cleaning store. Around 1940 the family, which included older sister Marie, relocated to Detroit and resumed the cleaning business. It was in the Motor City that, according to...
My grandmother always reminds me: you have lost your mother-tongue. When I return to Sri Lanka for brief visits, she tells me how I used to understand her. Like my nephews and nieces do now when I was a child, I would listen to spoken Tamil and reply in English. There is nothing I can say to her accusation except to agree. Yes, I have lost my...
What is Professor Goldthree reading? We sat down with Reena Goldthree, Professor of Caribbean History at Princeton University, and talked about some of the most exciting books on her shelf right now. Here is what she had to say...
Making history once more!
This year, African American Studies welcomes thirteen new sophomores as concentrators to the department. This is is the largest class of AAS concentrators in the Department's history! Meet the new concentrators below. Not Pictured: Aisha Tahir, and Kiki Gilbert
Sadly, Nigel’s light was forced to shine amid the shadow of a queer antagonism that is not reducible to school bullying. In the wake of Nigel’s tragic death a local news station posted a story to Facebook seeking to raise awareness about LGBTQ-based harassment. Local Sheriff Jeff Graves commented on the post with words that are as revealing as...
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Opinion & Analysis
Morrison came to Princeton in 1989 to teach literature and creative writing. During her 17 years of teaching, she played a key role in expanding the University’s commitments to the creative and performing arts and to African American studies. In 1994, she founded the Princeton Atelier, which brings together undergraduate students in...
More simply put, in Hurston’s syntactic structure Lewis cannot be reduced to an object, the piece of wood that should make material what otherwise exists in memories, stories, and oral histories. And thus, in this brief moment, Hurston evokes the question that she would grapple with over and over in her career: How do you produce evidence of black...
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Faculty Highlight
While Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday and Ralph Ellison are not known as being “religious” figures, they have, in a way, become “sacred” figures. Revered, iconic and inspirational, their essential work contributed mightily to the creative climate of twentieth-century America, and did so in the midst of complex and evolving religious currents they...
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Faculty Highlight
JORDAN PEELE HAS STOCKED his film Us with enough terrifying, indelible images to haunt viewers’ dreams for many nights after they leave the theater: golden shears, caged white rabbits, hands dripping blood, and a creepy, animatronic owl that gets its comeuppance toward the movie’s end. Among these images is one more: a massive, eerily lit...
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Faculty Highlight
In this episode, Prof. Eddie Glaude discusses with Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson her application of research on textiles, music, and photography for her upcoming work Black Bodies White Gold. Professor Kesson, an Art Historian at heart, reveals the history and connections of blacks and cotton and their turbulent history across America and...
Vampirically, white vitality feeds on black demise—from the extraction of (re)productive slave labor to build the nation’s wealth to the ongoing erection of prison complexes to resuscitate rural economies—in these ways and many more, white life and black death are inextricable. Racist structures not only produce, but reproduce whiteness, by...
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Faculty Highlight
The Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) selected five undergraduates as 2019 Arthur Liman Fellows in Public Interest Law. Of the five undergraduates selected, three are African American Studies Concentrators.
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Student Highlight
Lincoln signed a bill in 1862 that paid up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.
Princeton University junior Nathan Poland has been awarded a 2019 Truman Scholarship, which provides up to $30,000 toward graduate school and the opportunity to participate in professional development programs to prepare for careers in public service.
Editor’s Note: This article represents the views and opinions of the author only and does not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian.
Over the spring break, we set out for London in search of the archives and traveling histories of some of the itinerant and exiled thinkers we were studying. We followed the route of several deportees from the U.S. back to Brixton, a neighborhood in South London where Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and his compatriot Claudia Jones ended up after...
Studies have shown that black students are subjected to higher disciplinary rates than whites, resulting in a number of negative life outcomes, including involvement in the criminal justice system.
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Research
Barkley L. Hendricks’s work has been compared to the realism of artists like Philip Pearlstein and William Bailey, both of whom were included in an exhibition entitled Seven Realists held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in 1974, the same year that Family Jules (No Naked Niggahs) 1974 (Tate L02979) was painted.1Hendricks’s art has...
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and Robin M. Boylorn, assistant professor of interpersonal and intercultural communication studies at the University of Alabama, spoke about Sojourner Truth at the Fairfax Campus.
Ethiopian scholars and priests shared their knowledge of Ethiopia’s ancient tradition of written literature and bound manuscripts with a large audience at Princeton on March 12.
Michelle Obama’s new book reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment that can be overcome through grit and grin. This is a dangerous proposition.
Professional football player and activist Michael Bennett is used to crowds of thousands in stadiums. On March 11, he greeted a slightly smaller, but no less enthusiastic crowd in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton as he settled into a leather armchair.
In this episode, Eddie Glaude sits down with Professor Wendy Belcher to discuss her recent book. Prof. Belcher reveals her connection to Ethiopia, and how her life experiences of growing up white in Africa seep through her perspective and understanding. Professor Belcher explains how her curiosity pushed her to research, archive, and translation...
From lock-ins to rallies, the Daily Princetonian features 50 years of black student activism on the Princeton University campus.
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Local / On campus
El Anatsui's survey exhibition "Triumphant Scale" at Haus der Kunst – the first ever in Europe – is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of his oeuvre thus far. Occupying the entire East Wing, the exhibition comprises key works from five decades of the artist's career.
With its first cohort of concentrators freshly graduated in June 2018, the Department of African American Studies (AAS) is looking to continue its work in education and research that engages...
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Local / On campus
The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography is awarded for excellence in the art of biography. This prize of $5,000 goes to the author of a distinguished work published in the United States during the previous calendar year. The winning title is considered by the judges to be a work of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit,...
The most important struggle in the US today is stopping the growth of the racist right-wing.
The white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia was the predictable outcome of the Republican Party’s racist agenda and Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
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Opinion & Analysis
Mellody Hobson, Class of ’91, visited campus this weekend after receiving the distinguished Woodrow Wilson Award. Hobson is the president of Ariel Investments and serves as a member on many corporate boards including that of Starbucks.
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Event Recap
Civil rights icon and scholar Angela Davis returned to her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, over the weekend. She originally planned the visit to receive the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but the institute withdrew the award last month, soon after the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center sent...
The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives featuring black protagonists in crime stories, conspiracy thrillers, prison novels, and Westerns...
How to live a creative life was the topic of a conversation between musician Questlove and Princeton professor Imani Perry on Feb. 15 at McCarter Theatre Center. The drummer, producer and author discussed the beauty of music, the benefits of boredom and the blocks of West Philadelphia where he grew up.
Professors Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Jelani Cobb, Jamilah Lemieux, Mychal Denzel Smith, George Wallace, and Walter Naegle are here to remind you that Black History is American History and it doesn't fit in one tweet.
The catastrophic 2017 hurricane season, which included two category 5 storms, briefly thrust the islands of the Caribbean to the forefront of the U.S. news cycle. The deadly hurricanes highlighted the Caribbean’s heightened vulnerability to weather-related disasters and the devastating effects of climate change.
As we step into 2019, Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Associate Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discuss and review the political climate of America. Professor Taylor points out the importance of continuing to organize and mobilize social activism, like Black Lives Matter, with the understanding that a single objective is more significant than...
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AAS21 Podcast
James Baldwin’s novel flopped in 1974. But Barry Jenkins’ film reveals the timely masterpiece it was.
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Faculty Highlight
Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. shares his insights on the often overlooked radical truths of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Though mainstream society remembers Dr. King's speeches of reform and peace, we must also not forget the disruptive nature of his dream for a better future.
Writing about race has transformed the life of Ta-Nehisi Coates since his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” was published to widespread acclaim. It placed him at the forefront of the national discussion about issues surrounding America’s racial history. On Nov.
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies Wallace D. Best, Princeton University
The American Academy of Religion (AAR) has selected the 2018 recipients of the Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion and the Best First Book in the History of Religions. This annual competition recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion.
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Faculty Highlight
AAS 21 is a podcast conversation about the books and ideas animating the field of African American Studies in the 21st Century and the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of race and racial groups. We invite you to listen as we “read” how race and culture are produced globally – looking past outcomes to beginnings...
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AAS21 Podcast
Professor Tera Hunter, a professor of history and African American studies at Princeton, has been awarded the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S.
The annual James Baldwin Lecture series was launched March 29, 2006 with the inaugural lecture presented by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Princeton University Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values.
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Press Release
Welcome to the AAS 21 Podcast. I'm Eddie Glaude, and I'm the Chair of African American Studies here at Princeton University. I'm delighted to have joined us today Professor Ruha Benjamin. She's in Social Professor here in the Department of African American Studies and a Faculty Associate in the Program on History of Science, the Center for Health...
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AAS21 Podcast
Professor Guild specializes in 20th century African-American social and cultural history, urban history, and then making of the modern African Diaspora with particular interest in migration, black internationalism, black popular music, and the black radical tradition.
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AAS21 Podcast
Every summer, Princeton University students travel overseas for unique six-week courses to explore the international dimensions of their academic interests. This year, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies will launch four new Global Seminars — including “...
Hello. I'm Eddie Glaude and I'm the chair of the Department of African-American studies here at Princeton University. And welcome to the African-American Studies podcast. Today I'm delighted to have as our guest my new and wonderful colleague, Professor Autumn Womack. Professor Womack specializes in 19th century and early 20th century African-...
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AAS21 Podcast
The Paul Hair Prize is presented in odd-numbered years to recognize the best critical edition or translation into English of primary source materials on Africa published during the preceding two years. The award is administered by the Association for the Preservation and Publication of African Historical Sources (APPAHS).
Jordan Thomas, of Newark, New Jersey, is concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and is also earning certificates in Portuguese language and culture and African...
Hello, I'm Eddie Glaude and I am the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and welcome to the African American Studies podcast. I'm delighted to have with me today my new and brilliant colleague, Reena Goldthree. Professor Goldthree specializes in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research...
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AAS21 Podcast
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AAS21 Podcast
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AAS21 Podcast
A committee of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and academic administrators selected the winners from nominations by students, faculty colleagues and alumni.
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Press Release
The primary mission of the Brodsky Center is to enable groundbreaking artists, both established and emerging, to create new work in paper and print. Artists-in-residence are invited to engage in one-on-one collaborations with the Brodsky Center’s master printers and papermakers.
Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage.
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AAS21 Podcast
This spring several Princeton University graduate students pursuing graduate certification in the Department of African American Studies earned awards and fellowships to support continued research in African American Studies and intersecting fields. The graduate certificate provides an opportunity for graduate students to complement doctoral...
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AAS21 Podcast
The Johns Hopkins for Institutional and Clinical Researchsponsor the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture Series with the goal of honoring the...
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AAS21 Podcast
The next president will have to face growing economic precarity for a large portion of the American public.
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AAS21 Podcast
The Board of Directors of Lannan Foundation announces the winner of this year’s Cultural Freedom Especially Notable Book Award: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, written by Princeton University African American Studies professor and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Chika Okeke-Agulu, associate professor of art and archaeology and African American studies, has been awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (CAA) for his book Postcolonial...
Writer Jennifer Howard explores the early life and significant work of Professor Wendy Laura Belcher, and where the two intersect, in a feature profile, "A Broader Notion of African Literature," which appeared in the September 2015 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Belcher spent three years living in Ethiopia as an adolescent, and...
The 2015 - 2016 academic year is not yet half-way over, yet the year has already brought about much to recognize and celebrate. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor released new books in the month of January, and Chika Okeke Agulu's recent book has won a major award.
As Princeton faculty, we write in support of our students who are currently occupying the President's office and those who are supporting them across campus. These are difficult times.
Each academic year, the Department of African American Studies selects postdoctoral fellows to spend a year at Princeton where they will use their expertise to write about race, as well as, instruct a departmental course for one semester.
Nell Painter's new course, Art School at African American Studies, combines actual making with art criticism.
The Ferguson is the Future symposium brought together scholars, activists and artists and asked: what stories about power, difference, and belonging fuel the social crises we face today? How does visionary fiction offer us models for creating new possible worlds?
"Princeton's outstanding faculty members in African American studies address cultural, social and political issues of urgent importance to our students, our nation and the world," President Christopher L.
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Press Release
