College of Letters & Science
“When I was a Master’s student, I made a discovery in the digitized archives. I found records of Henry Tutt, a Black man who was advocating for Black voting rights and petitioning for a name change in 1841,” Gavin Huismann shares keenly. “I still consider this discovery to be a highlight of my time as …
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 …
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 …
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 …