Description The Africana Studies Program and the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University invite applications for a tenure-track position in African Art History at the rank of assistant or associate professor with tenure (pending positive review). The successful candidate will have a tenure home in the Art Department, with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Program, with teaching and service divided equally between the two units. We encourage applications from scholars focused on visual/material culture from anywhere on th ..read more

On October 12, 2021, a six-foot statue of educator and activist, Mary McLeod Bethune was unveiled in Daytona Beach, Florida. In early 2022, the statue will be moved to the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, a site comprised of statues donated by individual states to honor those notable to that state’s history. Bethune will become the first African American to have a state-commissioned statue in the hall and she will replace a confederate general who once represented the state of Florida.[1] The move to include Bethune represents a positive push toward recognizing the impact of historical figur ..read more

Image Credit: Bellew, Frank, Artist. Visit of the Ku-Klux / drawn by Frank Bellew. , 1872. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001695506/. Ever since police officers in the narcotics unit of the Louisville Metro Police Department killed  Breonna Taylor as she slept in her own home, I’ve been thinking about night riders in the nineteenth century, and finding disturbing parallels with SWAT and narcotics units in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Somehow these modern-day police entities are doing work similar to that of the white supremacist terrorists of a cent ..read more

On August 10, 2020, the Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah featured an interview with Black British creative, Michaela Coel. The topic of discussion was her spectacular dramedy, I May Destroy You. Aired on HBO in the US, the series explores life after sexual assault and the complex, often destructive ways that trauma manifests in victims. It centers on Arabella, a character played by Coel, whose processing of post-rape trauma drives the narrative. But we also see the subtle ways that her best friends, Terry and Kwame – played by Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu, re ..read more

After playing in the 2018 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) season, Minnesota Lynx Maya Moore announced that she would take a break from her professional basketball career to focus on reforming the nation’s justice system. For those who may not know: Moore is a league MVP, the WNBA Finals MVP, a five-time all-star, a four-time WNBA champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and a two-time NCAA champion from the University of Connecticut. Moore, who had been the face of the WNBA, recently helped exonerate Jonathan Irons, a Black man wrongfully convicted of burglary and assault ..read more

Image credit: Johnny Silvercloud / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) On May 30, 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered his daily press briefing on New York’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. About nine minutes into his presentation, Cuomo expressed remorse for the horrific police murder of forty-six-year-old African American Minnesota resident George Floyd, and he acknowledged racial inequalities within the American healthcare and criminal justice systems. Cuomo rightfully commented that Floyd’s killing was not an isolated incident, but rather part of “a cont ..read more

Twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor should be alive today.  Instead of enjoying a day off work or joining other emergency medical technicians, deemed essential, in Louisville, Kentucky’s fight against the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, Taylor joined the shockingly high number of black women and girls—such as Aiyana Stanley Jones, Rekia Boyd, and Sandra Bland who were—killed by the police.  At a time when over 100,000 Americans, many of them disproportionately black and brown, have lost their lives to Covid-19, her mother Tamika Palmer’s primary concern for Taylor’s safety revolved around t ..read more

The Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) is pleased to announce the 2020 Letitia Woods Brown prizes for the best book, anthology, and article in African American women’s history.  The Woods Brown prizes are awarded annually by ABWH. 2020 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize for the best book or anthology in African American Women’s History The competition is open to all books, anthologies, and articles concerning African American women’s history published between June 1, 2019, and May 30, 2020, including those written by members and non-members of ABWH. Winners will be no ..read more

Image Credit: tedeytan / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) May 16, 2020, marked the ten-year anniversary of the violent death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven-year-old black girl fatally shot in the head by a white police officer during a raid gone tragically wrong in Detroit. Officer Joseph Weekley’s first trial ended in a hung jury, and a judge eventually dismissed the charges against him after a second trial in 2014. Last year the city settled with Aiyana’s family for $8.25 million.  That the ten-year-anniversary of Aiyana’s death passed largely unackn ..read more

Our thoughts are with those affected by COVID-19 in the U.S. and around the globe. We pray that this email finds you and your families safe. We would be honored if you would join us for another exciting premiere of ABWH-TV on Thursday, May 7 at 2 CST/3 EST. In Episode 3, we present our panel of experts discussing the Lifetime original movie The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel. About our panelists Treva Lindsey @divafeminist Dr. Lindsey, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, specializes in African American women’s history, Black popul ..read more