Simon Gikandi and Chika Okeke-Agulu elected to British Academy for contributions to the humanities

By Jamie Saxon Simon Gikandi, the Class of 1943 University Professor of English, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of art and archaeology and African American studies, have been elected corresponding fellows of the British Academy, in Continue Reading →

The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930

University of Chicago Press, April 2022 Autumn Womack, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a Continue Reading →

Deemed unfit for freedom

Weisenfeld’s research tracks the rise in psychiatry as a field of science and the parallel ascent of the discipline’s racialized theories about African American religious practices and mental health. Continue Reading →

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

Author: Kinohi Nishikawa, assistant professor of English and African American studies Publisher: University of Chicago Press, November 2018 The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was Los Angeles Continue Reading →

Bound in wedlock: Professor of history explores slavery’s shackles on black families

For her new book, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017), Tera Hunter, a professor of history and African American studies, meticulously researched court records, legal Continue Reading →

Race for profits

Research on the 1970s urban housing crisis exposes a familiar history By Catherine Zandonella PREDATORY LENDERS. Subprime and no-doc loans. Mortgage-backed securities. Mass foreclosures that disproportionately impacted minority homeowners. Sound like 2008? It was 1972. Continue Reading →

Unconscious bias: Research helps break down barriers

STACEY SINCLAIR WAS AWARE OF INEQUALITY AT A YOUNG AGE. ”On some level I was always interested in injustice,” said Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology and African American studies. “As a 7-year-old, I wanted Continue Reading →