The Black Studies Collective aims to remedy the intellectual isolation created through a sustained legacy of disinvestment in Black/Black Studies faculty by cultivating an intellectually rigorous Black Studies community. While Stanford provides a number of courses and research groups focused on themes of race, ethnicity and coloniality, the absence of sustained graduate-level training in the field of Black Studies is palpable.
Our collective is a graduate student-led initiative to ameliorate this deficit through the study of core and emerging Black Studies theories, including ontology, the body, Black visual and sonic cultures, transnational Black liberation, and Black Feminist and Black Queer and Trans theories.
In 2017, there was both a palpable dearth of a black studies community at Stanford and immense graduate student desire for such a community. Through a series of conversations between graduate students and former Associate Director of African & African American Studies, Jakeya Caruthers, a reading group of about ten graduate students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences formed. We spent the first year meeting three times per quarter to discuss Black Studies texts. Since then the collective has expanded its reach to include in addition to the reading group, a writing workshop and a speaker series.
Join us in conversation with MacArthur "Genius" Recipient, Saidiya Hartman. She is scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured.
Graduate Student Workshop from 12-1:30PM at Humanities Center Board Room. By RSVP only.
The Black Studies Collective has an exciting event coming up next week with Dr. C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. He will be hosting a workshop with graduate students to discuss work from his upcoming manuscript tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning You must RSVP to attend the event, as the spaces are limited.
RSVP Link: https://tinyurl.com/uooxl92
The Black Studies Collective, CORE Workshop, and the Decolonial Collaborative Research Group are pleased to invite you to join us for the first in a three-part panel series. Our first event will be an exciting panel on the history of black activism & organizing in the Bay Area and the origins of African-Americans in greater California. We are honored to have Dr. Johnetta Richards, Dr. Rickey Vincent, and Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin serve as panelists. Our discussion will be moderated by Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the King Institute and Professor of American History at Stanford.
Elea McLaughlin is a doctoral candidate in musicology. She received her B.A. in music from Florida State University, where she studied voice. Her current research focuses on Black musical performance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular attention to how Black female vocalists navigated the afterlife of blackface minstrelsy in musical theater.
Learn MoreKristen Jackson is a 2nd year PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, studying Race, Inequality, Language and Inclusion. She hails from Southfield, Michigan, and attended the University of Pennsylvania for her undergraduate and master's degrees. Prior to matriculating at Stanford, she was a high school history teacher in West Philadelphia. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Black feminism and inclusive education. When not reading for class, she enjoys staring contests with her dog, lifting heavy things, attempting to learn rugby and trying out new recipes.
Learn MoreMatthew Alexander Randolph (Matt, he/him) is a third-year History Ph.D. student at Stanford University in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the African Diaspora. His current research project traces the global dimensions of Frederick Douglass's thought and politics, especially his travels and diplomacy in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Matt received his B.A. in History and Spanish from Amherst College in 2016 and his M.A. in History from Stanford in 2021. Outside of academia, Matt is a storyteller and community-builder with a passion for leveraging history to inspire and empower others while pushing for social change. He has contributed to public history and digital projects in the Bay Area and beyond, including volunteer work for the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and his alma mater, Amherst College in Massachusetts. Matt is originally from the Baltimore, MD area and currently lives in Oakland, California.
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