The SoulFolk Collective W.E.B. Du Bois famously asked the question of the Black community: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Drawing inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, …
Month: April 2025
Dr. Andrene Wright-Johnson on marrying theory with practice
Dr. Andrene Wright-Johnson joined the Department of African American Studies as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow in the fall of 2023 after completing an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University. Now …
A visual storyteller
Bob Trondson on the impact of human stories As the founder of Cloud North Films, Bob Trondson brings a passion for history, literature, and a background in African American Studies to his work in documentary …
Spring 2025 Chair’s Letter
In the wake of student activism, our department offered its first classes fifty-five years ago, in the fall of 1970. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 sparked a wave of student …
Badgers in NYC
In partnership with The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the department traveled with fifteen undergraduates to experience African American and Jewish culture in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side through food, museums, and walking …
On service
How UW–Madison professors work to collapse the town and gown divide and illustrate how history is ever affecting our present This spring, four UW–Madison professors continue to bring the Wisconsin Idea to life through their …
Stephen Chandler on the classroom and community
Stephen Chandler’s academic journey is defined by a passion and a deep connection to Black education. What began as a theater scholarship evolved into a path shaped by discovery and purpose, ultimately leading him to …
Fugitivity, DEI, PWI Struggles, and Poetics
UW–Madison students present research, art, and scholarship in the 1st Annual African American Studies Student Symposium The symposium featured student presentations spanning art, sociology, and current events. Eleven students delivered talks, and the event concluded …
Rethinking popular narratives through contemporary art
Oluwatosin Philip Adeyemi, a second-year master’s student, shares a synopsis of his thesis and inspirations Philip Adeyemi’s research in the African American studies field offers an intervention into how we engage with visual histories of …
Disrupting normalcies in higher education
Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington on the cruciality of a Black feminist education “bell hooks urges us to transgress. She gives us an avenue to think about the academy in a non-white manner; hooks teaches us …