On Monday, April 3, 2023, Poet/ Professor Kate Rushin, Professor Carolyn Cooper, and Professor Wayne Marshall led a panel of discussion on music and poetry of the African Diaspora.
Congratulations to Prof. Rowland Abiodun, Professor of the History of Art and Black Studies, on becoming the Principal Consultant for the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History
The John Randle Centre
A book from one of our majors - Nyani Nkrumah '92 Set in 1980s Mississippi, my novel, Wade in the Water, examines the generational legacy of racism in two different families, one black and one white, within the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between a mistreated and precocious eleven-year-old girl, Ella, and Katherine St. James, a mysterious white graduate research student from Princeton. Katherine’s arrival in the black side of the still racially divided town draws suspicion, but the two embark on a friendship that drowns out the outside world- until it doesn’t, and the relationship grows more fraught as Ella unwittingly pushes against Katherine’s carefully constructed boundaries that guard secrets and a complicated past.
Amazon Editor's PickElizabeth Herbin-Triant received a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship for 2022–2023 to support her book project titled "Lords of the Lash and Loom: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Slave-Grown Cotton."
Jallicia Jolly has been awarded a Ford Foundation 2022 Postdoctoral Fellowship that will support the completion of her first book manuscript, which is titled "Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in Times of HIV/AIDS," which is under contract with University of California Press.
Olufemi Vaughan has been named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. His project is titled "“Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria,1926–1994.” The project is based on about three thousand family letters from Femi's late father’s library that focus on real-life family stories in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Earlier this month, the board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a group of 180 exceptional individuals. The fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
During World Wars I and II, African American troops were subjected to experimental medical treatments based on racial stereotypes. Professor Khary Oronde Polk, of the Black Studies and SWAGS departments, discussed his book, Contagions of Empire, which examines the bias behind these treatments and the physical and mental toll they exacted on their recipients. The National World War I Museum and Memorial hosted this discussion and provided the video.
VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT
It’s a subculture often dismissed with a punch line: Nigerian youth who email unsuspecting victims and convince them to send money in return for nonexistent goods or deals. This semester, 25 Amherst students looked beyond the punch line to the young perpetrators of the infamous scam.
Read more