College of Letters & Science
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 to de-center the heteronormative and patriarchal right-centered way of the academy,” says Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington, seated behind her desk …
A conversation with Dr. Quanda Johnson Quanda Johnson’s personal and professional journey resists a single definition. “I am a collage,” she says simply. “I am collaging my life together.” When she speaks, her language pulses with memory. Her work, a layered and textured experience inspired by the likes of Romare Bearden, Coco Fusco, and Bill …
On March 6, 2025, students and faculty from the Department of African American Studies came together to attend a performance of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a University Theater production directed by Baron Kelly. Sixty-eight students from the department were in attendance, many experiencing live theater for the first time. This event was made possible …
Music scholar, historian, and African American Studies lecturer Alexander Shashko turns the clock back fifty-five years: “This was supposed to be a list of ten songs from 1970, the year that the Department of African American Studies began. As I was compiling it, though, I kept finding myself trying to choose between two songs that …
The Tom Shick Award is given to undergraduate or graduate students who have maintained a high academic standing and who have demonstrated an intellectual vigor and concern for racial equality that epitomizes the life of Tom W. Shick. Shick came to UW–Madison as a graduate student in 1969 and became a lecturer in 1973. Shick …
Last Saturday, April 5th, African American studies lecturer Melanie Herzog served as a moderator and presenter on the panel: “A Sense of Purpose and Integrity” at the National Gallery of Art’s Elizabeth Catlett exhibition. With an emphasis on artists’ encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, …