Conceived at Busboys & Poets in the Fall of 2013, the seminar held its inaugural meeting in Feb of 2014. Presently, we meet at the Teamsters archive on the 7th floor of George Washington University’s Gelman library.
As a works-in-progress seminar, we meet several times per year. During each meeting, we critique two pre-circulated papers, each around 25-40 pp. in length. The seminar is open to any scholar with a focus on historically-oriented scholarship relating to the experience of peoples of African descent in the diaspora or in Africa.
Please contact me if you would like to be included.
Previous Presenters
Dec 2016
Natanya Duncan (LeHigh University) – “White in Color Only: Poets of the Negro World”
Nov 2016
Cecilia Cárdenas-Navia (Yale University) – “From Soul Sister to King of Pop: Skin Technologies to Epidermal Transformation in the Melanin Era”
Izetta Mobley (University of Maryland) – “London Fog: Masculinity, Photography, and Blackness in the Aesthetic Production of Yinka Shonibare and Oscar Wilde”
Sept 2016
Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) – “Reparations in the Civil Rights Era”
Jessica Levy (Johns Hopkins) – “Governing the ‘Black Power’ City: Leon H. Sullivan, Opportunities Industrialization Centers Inc., and the Rise of Black Empowerment”
Aug 2016
Marcia Chatelain (Georgetown) – “The 18 in Oakbrook: Black McDonald’s Operators and the Quest for Parity”
Brandi Summers (Virginia Commonwealth) – “Race, Nostalgia, and the Remaking of Washington DC’s Atlas District”
June 2016
Claire Raymond (University of Virginia) – “The Original Experience: Photography of Carrie Mae Weems and Sally Mann”
Melanie Chambliss (Yale University) – “An Inter-Related Whole”: Theorizing Arthur Schomburg’s Mode of Historical Recovery”
April 2016
Adam Ewing (Virginia Commonwealth) – “Popular Pan-Africanism: Rumor, Identity, and Intellectual Production in the Age of Garvey”
Tikia Hamilton (Princeton University) – “A Blessing in Disguise”: The Marian Anderson Concert and the Campaign for the Equitable Use of School Facilities”
Feb 2016
Amira Davis (Johns Hopkins) – “‘Peddling Flesh'”: Black Women Baseball Players and the Politics and Price of Representation.“
Doretha Williams (George Washington University) – “Laboring in the Righteous Cause: Maintaining the Home in the Midst of Racial Oppression and Violence.”
Jan 2016
Marcia Chatelain (Georgetown) – “Feeding the Franchise: Voters, Business Owners, and Black Progress.”
Melissa Stuckey (Independent Historian) – “A Second Emancipation: Freedom and the Black Town”
Dec 2015
Paige Glotzer (Johns Hopkins University) – “New Deal Policy and Neighborhood Protection.”
Shana Klein (American University) – “Cutting Away the Rind: Uncovering the History of Race and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Watermelon.”
Oct 2015
Brandi Summers (Virginia Commonwealth University) – “Haute Commodities: Defining a Market for Blackness in High Fashion.”
Theresa Runstedtler (American University) – “Racial Bias: The Black Athlete and Reagan’s War on Drugs.”
Aug 2015
Tom Gugliemo (George Washington University) – “‘Jim Crow in Uniform’: African-American GIs, World War II, and the Rise of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Jennifer Williams (Morgan State University) – “From Harlem to Bronzeville, with Love.”
June 2015
Marcia Chatelain (Georgetown University) – “The People Have Spoken: Black Mayors, Black Unity, and Black McDonald’s.”
Claire Raymond (University of Virginia) and Jacqueline Taylor (Tulane University) – “Carrie Mae Weems’s Architectural Transformations.”
April 2015
Nemata Blyden (George Washington University) – “African Americans and Africa: Links in History”
Erin Chapman (George Washington University) – “Staging Gendered Radicalism: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry’s Vision of Freedom”
March 2015
Francis Gourrier (University of Wisconsin) – “On Raymond Parks, the Husband of Mrs. Rosa Parks”
Tony Perry (University of Maryland) – “In Bondage When Cold Was King: The Frigid Terrain of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland.”
Nov 2014
Natanya Duncan (Morgan State University) – “Adeyola Garvey – ‘Queen of Garvey Ladies”
Psyche Williams-Forson (University of Maryland) – “Judge Not…and other Edicts of Common Sense: The Politics of Good Food/Bad Food in African American Communities”
Oct 2014
Robert Bland (University of Maryland) – “‘Like a Miniature Tuskegee’: Industrial Education, Agrarianism, and the Redefinition of Reconstruction”
Claire Raymond (University of Virginia) – “Carrie Mae Weems, Zora Neale Hurston, and Haunting”
Sept 2014
Marcia Chatelain (Georgetown) – “The Miracle of the Golden Arches: Race, Civil Rights and McDonald’s in Los Angeles”
Eric Arnesen (George Washington) – “”Revolutionary Evangelism” (1918-1919), comprising Chapter 4 of A. Philip Randolph: A Political Life.
May 2014
Carole Emberton (SUNY – Buffalo) – “The Freedwoman’s Tale: Reconstruction Remembered in the Federal Writer’s Project Ex-Slave Narratives”
Erin Chapman (George Washington) – “Staging Gendered Radicalism: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry’s Vision of Freedom”
March 2014
Nathan D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins) – “The Strange Career of Black Liberalism: Black Property, White States, and an Untold Legacy of Jim Crow America”
Theresa Runstedtler (American) – “Brothers from over the Water”: Frederick J. Loudin’s Fisk Jubilee Singers, the White Pacific, and the Maoris of New Zealand”
Feb 2014
Jacqueline Taylor (University of Virginia) – “Azurest: A Modern Utopia of the Real”
Jay Driskell (Hood College) – “Rethinking Interracial Politics and the Long Civil Rights Movement: Black Jacksonville and the Knights of Labor, 1887-1892.”