Welcome to the Department of Afro-American
Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is dedicated to carrying on the vision of the elders and ancestors who devoted themselves to the highest standards of intellectual rigor and to the realization of a vision of true equality and opportunity. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, John Hope Franklin, Zora Neale Hurston, the Department is committed to bringing the fruits of academic research to the broadest possible audience, within and beyond the walls of the University. We believe that the deepest understanding of the complex reality of race in America requires a truly interdisciplinary approach, one that draws on history and literature, the social sciences and the arts. We offer undergraduate majors in five areas: literature and culture; theater, music and the visual arts; history; Black Women's Studies; and inter-group relations.
 

Announcements

Sagashus Levingston received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to study Porgugese this summer.  The Fellowship covers tuition and provides a $2,500 stipend.

Robin Brooks, one of our former M.A. students received the McKnight Fellowship---funding for five years and will be attending University of Florida.

Tessa Lowinske Desmond (MA ‘05) has received theThe K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, which recognizes graduate students who show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education; who demonstrate a commitment to developing academic and civic responsibility in themselves and others; and whose work reflects a strong emphasis on teaching and learning.
The awards are sponsored by K. Patricia Cross, David Gardner Professor of Higher Education, Emerita, at the University of California, Berkeley.  From 1996 through 2005, the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards were administered by the American Association for Higher Education, where Professor Cross had served as Chair of AAHE’s Board of Directors.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities became the partner association in 2006 and is pleased to continue the tradition of this prestigious award.

Two of our Masters students in the Department of Afro-American Studies, Jim Hollar and Sagashus Levingston, have recently been awarded HEX Grants from The Center for the Humanities. HEX, or the Humanities Exposed program, is a public scholarship initiative that awards funding to graduate students for starting community programs. Each grant recipient, or HEX Scholar, designs a project that brings their research into a public context and addresses a community need in Madison, linking the campus and community in creative and original ways.
Jim and Sagashus were awarded a $2000 HEX Grant for their joint project proposal, "Slavery and the Making of the Matrix," which aims to provide a space to engage struggling students, particularly three groups of African-American males, with culturally relevant instruction. By teaching the history of slavery in a new way, with parallels to contemporary society, Jim and Sagashus hope to foster social consciousness and awareness of systems of social control. Additionally, they hope to prepare these students for existing academic programming in Madison such as the Odyssey Project, the Omega School, and Federal TRIO programs.
The Humanities Exposed (HEX) program is in its fifth year and has been funded by the Evjue Foundation and the UW Graduate School. HEX strives to bring a more public orientation to research in the humanities, and to create a cadre of public scholars in the UW-Madison Graduate School who are unafraid to work in and with communities. Further, HEX hopes to foster sustainable university-community partnerships that last beyond the tenure of the graduate students in our program. As you may already know, we've had a HEX Scholar from the Department of Afro-American Studies in the past, Crystal Moten, whose project remains ongoing, in the form of classroom materials utilized by the Madison East High School history faculty. I would like to extend my congratulations to our two new HEX Scholars from Afro-American Studies—Jim and Sagashus—for their commitment to addressing community needs in Madison by sharing their knowledge and talents.

David Green has been awarded the 2008 Phil Zwickler Memorial Research grant by Cornell University for his current research project on the National Association of Black and White Men Together; tentatively titled Queering Civil Rights, Coloring Stonewall: A History of Quare Interracial Activism, 1980-1990 this project aims to place gay men and lesbian women of color as political activist in the otherwise white-centered Gay liberation movement. Cornell University awards a select number of scholars whose research make critical contributions to human sexuality studies. David is a second year graduate student in the department. His research interests in African American gay and lesbian social and cultural histories are critical and instructive: Black gay men and lesbian women must be recognized for their intellectual and political activism in both the Civil Rights and Gay and Lesbian movements. David is also a 2008 Audre Lorde Award recipient. Audre Lorde Scholarship Awards are designed to recognize out lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender students of color who are making significant contributions to LGBT communities. David’s award winning poem “Silent Soliloquy” speaks to the injustices that out black gay men face in social and academic communities and, in the words of Audre Lorde, suggests that “silence will not protect you.”