News Archive
2017–18
June 19, 2018
Professor Carina Ray says, "We celebrate Juneteenth because it represents our collective freedom as a people, rather than the piecemeal, protracted, and fractured freedom that the series of decrees and legislative acts, beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation, bequeathed to us." Juneteenth, celebrated each year on June 19, marks the day on which the end of slavery was finally declared in Texas — the last state in which enslaved people were emancipated." Happy Juneteenth!
April 17, 2018
Professor Derron Wallace has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The fellowships are designed to create career development opportunities for select faculty with promising research projects. In so doing, these awards further strengthen the pipeline to the professoriate and support tenure progress for junior faculty. "It is essential that we continue to create new pathways and career development opportunities for promising junior faculty members," said Stephanie J. Hull, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Spring 2018
Check out Parts 1 and 2 of "Artist Talk: Manthia Diawara" in conversation with our very own Professor Salah Hassan, hosted by the Sharjah Art Foundation. They speak about the development of Diawara's intellectual and artistic trajectory as well as the significance of material culture, music, poetry, visual art and film in his approach to historiography. Manthia Diawara is a professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University.
April 30, 2018
Professor Derron Wallace has also been named the Stuart Hall Fellow from the the 2018-19 cohort of W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African-American research. Additionally, Professor Wallace is the first junior faculty member to receive the Stuart Hall Fellowship, which will support his project, "Seeking A Safe Way to School: Black Caribbean Youth Negotiating Police Surveillance in London and New York City." Congratulations, Professor Wallace!
Spring 2018
Congratulations to Professor Greg Childs for receiving an American Antiquarian Society-NEH Fellowship in support of his book project, "Seditious Spaces, Public Politics: Antiracism, Freedom and Sedition in 1798 Bahia, Brazil."
May 16, 2018
Congratulations to Professor Derron Wallace, who recently received two incredible awards in recognition of his research and scholarship!
Professor Wallace is the recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award from the African Diaspora Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). The award is given at the annual CIES conference to exceptional scholars who are on the cutting edge and have the potential to make a contribution across the African diaspora. The selection committee is comprised of highly accomplished scholars who are members of the CIES African Diaspora Special Interest Group.
Since its founding in 1956 as the first comparative education society in the world, the CIES has grown into a dynamic professional association and is dedicated to increasing the understanding of educational issues, trends, and policies through comparative, cross-cultural and international perspectives. The CIES African Diaspora Special Interest Group seeks to foster a community of scholars and practitioners to engage with the historical contexts and contemporary educational experiences of Black communities across the globe. A broader analysis of the educational realities of African descendants within and outside the U.S. offers the opportunity to review similar and different challenges, lessons, and new possibilities.
Professor Wallace has also received the Most Outstanding Paper Award in International Studies from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for "Negotiating Girls' Empowerment: Models of Assertive and Subversive Resistance in Rwanda's Only Inclusive School." The purpose of the Special Interest Group in International Studies is to provide a forum for the exchange of information among educators involved in research, planning, development, implementation and evaluation of international studies.
April 19, 2018
Professor Faith Smith and Gilberto Rosa ’19 are developing a course tentatively titled "Theatre of the Caribbean." Professor Carina Ray and Gabriel Fontes are working on a on a research project that follows the way exiled Black nationalist Nehanda Abiodan that came to be known as the "Madrina of Cuban Hip-Hop."
February 23, 2018
Professor Ray recently traveled to the Writers Project of Ghana for a recorded public reading and discussion of her current work. She discussed Ajjuah Fantini's poetry collection.
February 22, 2018
As a Radcliffe fellow, Professor Williams is working on a book about what he considers one of W.E.B. Du Bois' greatest missteps: "The Black Man and the Wounded World," an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I. An article in the Harvard Gazette discusses the new book.
January 10, 2018
Professor Carina Ray has been awarded a Mandel Faculty Grant for her project, "Talk of Freedom: An Oral History of Cuban Participation in African Liberation Struggles." These grants are supported by a generous gift from the Mandel Foundation and are intended to support a member of the Brandeis faculty working in the humanities, humanistic social sciences or creative arts. The grant competition, overseen by the MCH Steering Committee, accepts proposals as diverse as the humanities themselves, ranging from collaborative projects to individual archival research, from seed money for developing new classes or new ways of presenting research. Congratulations, Professor Ray!
December 5, 2017
The 2017 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize winner is Carina Ray for her book, "Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana." The Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize is awarded by the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association for an outstanding book published by a woman that prioritizes African women's experiences. Named in honor of Ama Ata Aidoo, the celebrated Ghanaian novelist and short-story writer, and Margaret Snyder, the founding director of UNIFEM, this $500 prize seeks to acknowledge the excellence of contemporary scholarship being produced by women about African women.
October 16, 2017
Adducing women of color feminism's theories of the flesh and Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the grotesque, this essay by Professor Abdur-Rahman advances a theory of black grotesquerie as an aesthetic mode in the project of textualizing African American life in the catastrophic present. Rather than merely signifying excess, dread or decay, black grotesquerie delineates an expressive practice of contortion, substitution, inversion and corruption. Reading together works by visual artist Wangechi Mutu and author Marci Blackman, the essay illustrates the ways in which black grotesquerie reconfigures the terms of contemporary black struggle by rendering the boundary between (black) living and dying porous and negotiable.
August 27, 2017
Professor Janet McIntosh was awarded Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her ethnography, "Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans," looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in post-independence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to pronouncing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, McIntosh focuses on their discourse and narratives to ask: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claim to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anti-colonial sentiment, phrasing and rephrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable?
August 5, 2017
Anita Hill, professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, was recently honored at the American Association of Nurse Attorneys Foundation's 35th annual meeting and educational conference in Boston. On Aug. 5, 2017, Hill received this year's Mary Eleanor McGarvah Award, which is granted to an individual or group that has made a significant contribution to the development of health law, nursing and policy.
July 25, 2017
The "Silent Protest Parade," as it came to be known, was the first mass African American demonstration of its kind and marked a watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement. As I have written in my book. "Torchbearers of Democracy," African Americans during the World War I era challenged racism both abroad and at home. In taking to the streets to dramatize the brutal treatment of Black people, the participants of the "Silent Protest Parade" indicted the United States as an unjust nation.