College of Letters & Science
AAS Graduation Program Message From the Chair Dear Graduating Students, Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine addressing our graduating majors, certificate holders and graduate students under these circumstances. I know I speak for the faculty and staff in the Afro-American Studies Department in applauding your achievements, made all the more remarkable …
Anthony Black will be giving a job talk entitled Are You A Wigsplitter? Contraband Rhetoric And The Web Carceralpreneur on Friday, April 24 at 1:00 pm. Use the link below to join the talk on BBCollaborate Ultra : https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/5971d6e6f3004e6faa348c21974368d4
Simon Balto, a former graduate student, was awarded the Nation Endowment for the Humanities 2020-2021 academic grant for his project entitled: Racial Framing: Blackfaced Criminals in Jim Crow America. The controversy over early-2019 revelations that Virginia politicians had donned blackface in their college years has generated a resurgence of interest in the history and …
Area Youth Getting Ready to Mobilize at MLK Day Youth Call to Service
For Tejumola Olaniyan: Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Father. Note: This is a very long post. In my moment of grief, I take solace in writing this reflection to process my confusion and sadness. Thank you to everyone who has checked on me. Thanks for your messages, calls, and responses to my first desperate Facebook post. The …
Thursday, October 31st 7:30pm, Collins Recital Hall in the UW Hamel Music Center, 740 University Avenue. Free admission. Celebrating the life and legacy of legendary jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon in words and music, this Wisconsin Book Festival event features jazz historian Maxine Gordon reading from her new book about Dexter and includes an on-stage …
Next Wednesday, October 16th, Afro-American Studies Professor Ethelene Whitmire will be on a panel about African Americans in Europe: London, Copenhagen, and Paris in Chicago at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. "African Americans have been traveling to and living in Europe since and before the end of slavery, right up to the present. Perhaps most famously noted in the writings of James Baldwin. Join us for a discussion of some of the varied aspects of this long and wonderfully complex story."
A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Simon Balto, author of Occupied Territory! In Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, a history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation. Simon Balto is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa. Event address: 315 W. Gorham St. Madison, WI 53703-2218
Congratulations! Thulani Davis received a Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award. Through the generosity of the Vilas Trust, the Office of the Provost is able to provide the Vilas Faculty Early Investigator Awards to recognize research and teaching excellence in faculty who are relatively early in their careers.
Poet, novelist, and trailblazing playwright Ntozake Shange died this weekend in Bowie, MD., at the age of 70. She was only the second African-American woman ever to have a play on Broadway. Shange is best known for her famous play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf. For Colored …